Toyota unveiled to the media on Saturday the first phase area of its Woven City, a demonstration city being built in central Japan to test advanced mobility technologies. The demonstration city in Susono, Shizuoka Prefecture, includes roads dedicated to automated mobility on the ground and "logistics streets," or underpasses to conduct experiments on the automation of logistics services. "From this place, I hope that future mobility will emerge," Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda said at a ceremony to mark the completion of the first phase building of Woven City. The first phase area covers 47,000 square meters. Eight of the 14 buildings completed last year are residential buildings, surrounded by an exchange center for inventors and residents, an energy building and others.

This article was originally published by Federico Cheli on Cities Today, the leading news platform on urban mobility and innovation, reaching an international audience of city leaders. For the latest updates follow Cities Today on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, or sign up for Cities Today News. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the transport sector are stimulating innovations for better and more targeted use of vehicles and infrastructure. This could optimize network performances, support the monitoring and management of traffic, and create the base for solutions that pave the way to future mobility, particularly in cities. Infrastructure management and vehicle design are evolving thanks to the opportunities offered by the widespread use of devices, such as smartphones and in-vehicle localization sensors, for processing, gathering and exchanging information among users and service providers, as well as for monitoring and detecting the performance of vehicles and behavior of people. Altogether these create a huge amount of data (big data), which is the primary source for using AI in transport, allowing computers to perform activities for humans, such as driving.

New figures estimate that there will be 76 million autonomous vehicles on the road by 2035, and that self-driving cars will be able to navigate crowded city streets as soon as 2022. Morgan Stanley has predicted that electric cars will corner 70% of the European vehicle market by the middle of the century…. This content is available only to members of Automotive World with a valid subscription.

What is it like to compete in a car race that isn't about speed, but rather fuel efficiency? As more than 100 people found out on March 3 at the Sonoma Raceway: really fun. A broad cross-section of the Silicon Valley community participated in Toyota Onramp 2017, an annual event hosted by Toyota Research Institute (TRI). The cornerstone of the event was the Prius Challenge, where the teams competed to see how efficiently they could drive nine laps at Sonoma Raceway. The competition also featured a special guest, Toyota Chairman of the Board Takeshi Uchiyamada.

BEIJING--An auto startup backed by internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. TCEHY 0.52 % plans to start selling premium electric cars globally by 2020, joining other Chinese car makers in taking aim at an increasingly crowded luxury market. Four month-old Future Mobility Corp. seeks eventually to sell several hundred thousand fully electric, highly automated, China-built vehicles a year. The company is also backed by Chinese luxury-car dealer Harmony New Energy Auto and Foxconn Technology Group, 2354 1.89 % which assembles iPhones for Apple Inc. AAPL 0.31 % Apple has been working on its own autonomous electric car. Deep-pocketed tech companies have backed a wave of new auto companies in China, where a drive to cut fuel consumption and pioneer the auto industry of the future has encouraged startups. Analysts, citing increasing competition and uncertainty over a subsidy-fueled boom in electric vehicles, question how such ambitions can be turned into reality.