Woven Planet’s CEO James Kuffner presented at Toyota Motor Europe’s (TME) annual Kenshiki event at the end of November 2022, together with TME’s Global and European executives. He shared Toyota’s ‘software-defined development’ approach to accelerate the development of electrified vehicles and provided further insights on Woven City, a ‘test track for mobility’. Kenshiki means “insight” in Japanese and this year’s edition to an audience of over 250 media, focussed on carbon neutrality, and the ongoing transformation to a mobility provider.

Plenary

Deep Dive

Summary of James Kuffner's Presentation

In its first presentation to European media, James Kuffner explained its unique role in Toyota’s transition to a mobility company. Woven Planet’s mission statement of ‘Mobility to Love, Safety to Live’.

“We are creating new software platforms and tools, processes and a culture shift to software-defined development for Toyota. This will improve productivity by delivering software that allows for scalability and the reuse of code across hundreds of Toyota and Lexus models.” he said.

Woven Planet’s vision embraces three types of mobility - Mobility of People, Mobility of Goods and Mobility of Information, and this guides its key focus areas:

1. Arene (‘software-defined development’) provides true state-of-the-art mobility programming as the basis for next generation vehicles. Notably, the ‘Arene’ software platform will provide the foundation for implementing Toyota’s Software Defined Architecture (SDA). We are building TPS (Toyota Production System) for software that allows the delivery of safe, high quality software on top of our high quality hardware.

2. Automated Driving & Advanced Driver Assistance System (AD/ADAS), responsible for Toyota Teammate and Lexus Teammate ‘Advanced Drive’ technology. In keeping with Toyota’s ‘Guardian’ approach to ADAS, it includes the continuous development of an array for enhanced safety and automated driving systems.

3. Woven City - James Kuffner provided further insights into the role of Woven City, currently under construction near Mt Fuji, Japan. When opened Woven City aspires to become a unique proving ground to accelerate innovation and deliver the world’s future mobility at scale. As a test track it will speed the development of mobility technology, food and agriculture, clean energy and healthy living all powered by software with security and privacy built-in to its design.

Further Information

If you are interested in finding out more about the entire Kenshiki event, please visit TME’s news release “Toyota Motor Europe on track to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040”.