Toyota project will take a village

TOKYO — Greenfield auto factory projects have the economic power to spawn a community around them. But research projects? Not so much — except when it comes to big-ticket autonomous driving projects, such as Toyota Motor Corp.'s efforts to master smart transportation.

To create the necessary test bed, Toyota plans to construct an entire futuristic town at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, to be named Woven City. Groundbreaking begins in 2021, and it could be up and running within five years. The 175-acre community will be used to study and develop cutting-edge technologies. Some 2,000 people — employees and their families, retired couples, retailers, visiting scientists and industry partners — are expected to inhabit Woven City, the automaker said.

The carmaker's vision is for Woven City to be a high-tech "community of tomorrow" that will be a living test bed of big data, robotics, automated mobility and artificial intelligence.

The envisioned city and the software developed to run it are all part of learning how to keep cars relevant, and how to keep Toyota profitable in a rapidly changing industry.

"It is necessary to have in mind the concept of connected cities, in which we need to think about things from a broad, car-inclusive, community-wide and society-wide perspective, rather than viewing cars as a separate entity," Toyota President Akio Toyoda said at a news conference here.

The automaker last month turned to Japan's biggest telecom company, NTT Corp., to get started. They will develop a Smart City Platform that will enable all the necessary computer wizardry to connect and communicate with the town and its traffic. The systems will be deployed in real-world test beds both in Woven City and in Tokyo, in an area around NTT offices.

NTT is already collaborating with other cities — including Las Vegas, Yokohama and Sapporo — on collecting, interpreting and managing big data. It will expand the service to other cities.

Toyota is concentrating on how to integrate new mobility concepts into a Web-connected urban infrastructure. NTT is expected to deliver the connectivity through super-fast wireless technology. NTT's mobile service, for example, begins offering 5G cellular transmission in Japan this month.

In tomorrow's smart cities, Toyota says, electric vehicles will become emergency power sources, for example. And through their sensors, vehicles will help create useful big data products, such as roadway hazard maps. Possibilities abound, from entertainment to e-commerce.

Likening smart cities to a human body, Toyoda said vehicles and houses will be similar to muscles and bones, while communications, delivered by NTT, will be the blood vessels connecting them.

"Woven City means changing by 180 degrees how we look at and think about the things around us," he said. "Cars will cease to be simply objects of personal ownership or a means of getting around. They will become structural elements of the societal system itself. The role that the automobile must fulfill is starting to change."

Costs to bring the vision to life are adding up. To cement the Toyota-NTT partnership, the companies said they will buy stakes in each other for about $1.81 billion each, through the purchase of treasury shares this month. The investments amount to a 2.07 percent stake in NTT for Toyota and a 0.9 percent stake in the carmaker for NTT.

Those expenditures are separate from the actual cost of the new town, and the costs associated with the ongoing research.