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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/05/inside-toyotas-10b-private-utopia-big-ideas-few-people-cameras-everywhere/ [arstechnica.com]

At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2020, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda pledged to build a city of the future, a place where researchers, engineers, and scientists could live and work together. It was framed as the start of a transformation for the world’s largest car company, moving it toward becoming a fully fledged mobility company.

Six months ago, after Toyota spent an estimated $10 billion to build an urban paradise atop a disused factory, the first residents moved in.
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The company says it wants to create a “society with zero accidents”—a tall order given the sheer number of Toyotas currently on the road.
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To get there, Absmeier said Toyota’s cars will need far more awareness than onboard systems can provide, even with the most advanced lidar, radar, and imaging sensors on the planet. For instance, the only way to spot a kid darting out from behind a truck, he said, is with cameras on every street watching for hazards, paired with warning systems for oncoming traffic.

This is part of the age-old promise of vehicle-to-everything communications [arstechnica.com]
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But if the idea of ubiquitous cameras watching everyone gives you pause, you’re not alone—it certainly seemed startling to me.
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There are plenty of cameras in urban areas around the world, but I haven’t seen anything approaching this level of density. All of them feed into what Toyota calls the Woven City AI Vision Engine, an agentic system designed to monitor, catalog, and report activity.
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Kota Oishi, general manager at Woven City, said that Toyota has surveyed people around the world, including Americans and Europeans, about their views on privacy and data. While people in Southeast Asia tended to be fairly relaxed about privacy, Japanese respondents were far more cautious, he said.
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“We have our own consent management to ensure that all the data being shared or being collected,” he said. “We act under the consent of the data provider.”
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“We allow the Weavers to select what they want to share or not. So whether it’s nothing or whether it’s everything is up to the individual,” Absmeier told me. Oishi, the GM, said the vast majority of the Weavers have opted into the roughly 20 experiments currently underway. For example, 98 percent allow a robot with cameras to operate in their homes.
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Daisuke Tanaka, a resident of Woven City, is something like an on-site digital matchmaker for Weavers. It’s not love they’re looking for, though; he connects creators and startups to spark collaborations every second Friday.
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Expansive coworking spaces dot Woven City, designed to foster spontaneous brainstorming, with plenty of 3D printers scattered throughout for rapid prototyping. The stated goal is to spur creation, innovation, and successful startups.
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Residents also help test delivery robots and a device called the Swake, a three-wheeled scooter with a leaning backrest for cornering. I didn’t get to ride one, but with a top speed of 12 mph (20 km/h) and a range of 3.7 miles (6 km), the Swake could be a more stable and (and fun) alternative to the average Lime or Bird scooter [arstechnica.com].
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The 20 prototype Swake machines also can’t leave the grounds, which limits the amount of real-world testing they’re getting.
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“Ultimately, we have to be a long-term sustainable business,” he said.

That’s why so much Toyota tech is being tested here, including efforts to refine systems like the AI Vision Engine before selling them to municipalities.
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“Physical AI” was everywhere at Woven City: robots of all shapes and sizes that, for the most part, didn’t seem to do much.
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The Guide Mobi, however, was more compelling. Like a tugboat guiding cargo ships in and out of port, it’s used in Woven City to autonomously move cars from the parking garage to a pickup area for residents. But where a tugboat provides thrust to keep boats moving, the Guide Mobi uses sensors to prevent the cars from going the wrong way.
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It was miserable and rainy for much of the time I spent wandering Woven City, and the moisture was an unfortunate limiting factor for its operations.

While the Guide Mobi braved the rain for a test delivery, the Swake tricycles can’t run in such conditions.
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and many of the robots we’d been told to expect skittering around the streets had stayed home to keep their sensors dry.
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It wasn’t quite Omega Man territory, but I didn’t see a single kid playing, dog out for a walk, or citizen running to one of the on-site convenience shops. The electric e-Palettes Toyota uses as buses were empty; they stopped at their stops, waited, and then left without picking up or dropping off anyone.

The curtains were drawn on all the apartments I could see, and there was no sign of laundry, bicycles, or other personal items on any apartment balcony.

I had to remind myself that this place is six months old, with only 100 Weavers so far—fewer residents than you’d find at your average Holiday Inn.
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Woven City is Toyota’s attempt to not only identify the next mobility zeitgeist but also to ensure it begins to take shape where the company can capitalize on it. It’s a big bet, but it’s backed by the world’s largest car company by volume and one of the few that has managed to consistently deliver products its customers want in a chaotic global market.

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