The Race to Build the First Fully Autonomous City

From stories about Toyota’s Woven City, there’s a brief, almost unnerving moment that keeps coming to mind. Every streetlight in the area flickered on one night without any human intervention. Nobody was aware of the reason. Three people had to physically push a robot that got stuck somewhere else. Once, a car refused to turn and was kept at red for thirty minutes by a traffic signal. These are not footnotes from a dystopian future. Brick by brick, glitch by glitch, they are the everyday texture of what it truly looks like to construct the world’s first fully autonomous city.

Located 90 minutes away from Tokyo in the shadow of Mount Fuji, Woven City appears from the outside as one might anticipate from a Japanese automaker’s vision of the future. neat lines. light wood. architecture that is soft and almost residential. However, journalists who have been allowed inside say that the silence is striking. There are very few people on the streets. The vehicles don’t bellow by. There are currently only 50 homes on a plot of land smaller than many suburban neighborhoods, with about 100 residents who are all employed by Toyota. The place seems to be holding its breath, waiting to see if the future can truly come on time.

It’s easy to draw comparisons between Woven City and Songdo in South Korea, Disney’s former EPCOT vision, or the partially constructed smart cities scattered throughout the Saudi desert. However, Toyota’s pitch is more focused and, in a sense, more truthful. The business is not attempting to promote a utopia. It is conducting a living experiment in robotics, hydrogen power, and autonomous mobility and observing what breaks. Daisuke Toyoda, a senior employee at Woven by Toyota and the chairman’s son, has been candid about the accidents. In this industry, where polished renderings frequently surpass functional prototypes by years, such candor is uncommon.

American cities, meanwhile, are competing in more subdued contests. Despite the lack of a clear state law, Portland has been moving forward almost obstinately with the idea of using driverless shuttles to fill in the gaps in public transportation. Even though its development has been slower than the hype suggested, Los Angeles, with its maze of freeways, horse trails, and congested urban corridors, may be the most fascinating natural laboratory in the nation.

Startups like nuTonomy have been welcomed onto Boston’s roads to see what happens when self-driving software and a city built in the 1700s collide. To be precise, none of these locations are vying to become fully autonomous cities. However, they are all laying tiny slabs of the same foundation.

Determining whether any of these scales is more difficult. A city of one hundred people, all of whom work for the construction company, isn’t truly a city. It is a set for a stage. When strangers move in, retirees, teenagers, and people who detest technology begin using these systems on a daily basis, that’s when the real test occurs. Investors appear to think that time is closer than doubters claim. The timely arrival of the necessary engineering, regulations, and human patience remains uncertain. As you watch this develop, you can’t help but think that we’re halfway between a science experiment and the preliminary sketch of something truly novel. It’s possible that the lights will turn on by themselves. Who will eventually be at home is the question.