Toyota’s Woven City: Hydrogen Heaven

The Japanese car giant is not a big fan of electric vehicles and has been focusing on hybrid for a while now. At CES Las Vegas, Toyota reinforced this message and announced an exciting new initiative: a hydrogen village.

Mount Fuji

The village will be called “Woven City” and is to be built on a 175-acre site at the base of Japan’s iconic Mount Fuji. Toyota has appointed the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels to build the site. Ingels was previously in charge of 2 World Trade Center, the Lego House and several of Google’s office buildings.

Woven City will be high tech with a focus on sustainability. The buildings will mostly be made from wood and manufactured according to traditional Japanese methods. The city will be powered by hydrogen fuel cells in combination with photovoltaic panels. Native vegetation will not be removed to build the site, but rather “woven” into the city’s streets and buildings.

Traffic

As for human and goods transportation, Toyota is conceiving 3 types of roads: high speed roads, low speed roads and pedestrian-only roads. In order to accelerate the assessment of this concept as well as to test autonomous and hydrogen vehicles, the 3 types of roads weave together and form an organic grid pattern.

The people who will be living in the city – Toyota employees, retired people, scientist, industry partners and retailers – will only be using autonomous and/or hydrogen powered vehicles. Toyota plans to deploy its e-Palettes both for people transport and retail.

Living Laboratory

Akio Toyoda, TMC’s president, shared at CES that Woven City “is a unique opportunity to develop future technologies, including a digital operating system for the city's infrastructure. With people, buildings and vehicles all connected and communicating with each other through data and sensors, we will be able to test connected AI technology... in both the virtual and the physical realms...”

The construction will start in 2021.