Toyota Woven City has reached its first anniversary as an active “living laboratory”, with around 30 proof-of-concept projects under way across mobility, artificial intelligence, energy and everyday services.
The project in Susono City, Shizuoka, officially launched as a real-world test environment in September 2025. One year later, Toyota and Woven by Toyota say roughly 160 people across about 80 households are participating as “Weavers” — residents who live with and provide feedback on new technologies as they are developed.
From concept city to active test site
Woven City was always pitched as something more useful than a technology showcase. The idea is to put new systems into an environment where people actually live, then refine them through repeated testing rather than waiting for a finished product.
Around 30 proof-of-concept projects are now under way. Seven additional companies have also joined as “Inventors”, taking the total to 31 organisations involved in testing products and services inside the city.
Those trials now span mobility, energy, healthcare, logistics, construction and public safety. That breadth is important: Woven City is starting to look less like a single autonomous-car project and more like an operating environment for connected technology.
AI is becoming a bigger part of the experiment
Woven by Toyota plans to release AI Vision Engine 2.0 by the end of 2026, expanding the system’s ability to describe real-world events in natural language, reason about why events occurred and identify specific behaviours in visual data.
The company is also testing its Integrated ANZEN System, a safety platform that uses real-world data and connected devices. Under an agreement with Shizuoka Prefecture, devices are due to be installed in prefectural government vehicles during fiscal 2026 so the system can collect data in a wider operating environment.
That matters because the hardest part of connected and autonomous technology is rarely the controlled demonstration. It is dealing with ordinary roads, ordinary people and the unpredictable edge cases that appear once a system leaves the test track.
We have seen the same challenge in the rapid expansion of autonomous mobility elsewhere. Lucid and Bolt’s planned 25,000-vehicle robotaxi programme shows how quickly the industry is moving towards larger deployments, while Uber and Wayve’s London robotaxi programme brings the same questions about real-world operation much closer to UK roads.
Phase 2 is now under construction
Toyota has also started construction of Woven City’s second phase. Site preparation is complete, with the new area currently scheduled for completion by the end of November 2028 and a planned capacity of around 600 residents.
Meanwhile, Phase 1 is about to become more visible. Visitor reservations are opening across Japan from 1 October, expanding a programme that began with visitors from Shizuoka Prefecture.
Tech Torque Verdict
A year on, Woven City is becoming more interesting precisely because it is less about futuristic renders and more about what happens when technology meets normal life. Around 30 live trials is still modest compared with the scale Toyota ultimately has in mind, but the combination of residents, outside companies and expanding AI systems gives the project something many smart-city concepts never reach: sustained real-world use.
The next test will be whether the strongest ideas can leave Susono and become products or services that work at scale. If that happens, Woven City could end up mattering far beyond Toyota’s own vehicles.
