Once, a traffic light that was supposed to turn green whenever a vehicle approached stayed red for half an hour. In the middle of the night, all the lights in the city turned on for no apparent reason. A robot got stuck, forcing three people to team up and brute-force it out of the way. About six months since the first residents moved in, Toyota’s city of the future is still very much a work in progress.
And the company is transparent about that; I heard all these examples of what’s gone wrong straight from Daisuke Toyoda, a senior vice president at Woven by Toyota (the carmaker’s mobility technology division) and the son of Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda.
