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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

> The city will eventually be home to about 2,000 people.

More like a small town?

A hotel?

Around 35.22N, 138.91E, right between Mishima and Gotenba in Shizuoka. Up to about 700k m^2 or 7500k sqft, max, about twice as big as the Las Vegas Convention Center or Boeing Everett factory. Used to be a smallish car plant next to a Toyota test track. Not at all an unpopulated area.

More or less an institute campus?

0: https://maps.app.goo.gl/HYDD2aF6drR7LuvV9

2,000 people for $10 billion.[1] That's $5 million per person.

The future is expensive, but of course the intent is to advance early-stage (ie expensive) technology toward affordability. It sounds like they want to winnow down to the best option among alternate system architectures, so I expect there's a fair bit of infrastructure-level redundancy too.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/toyota-city-japan-ai-robotics-eee...

Experiments always cost more than the at-scale product, perhaps they see it scaling down costs later

This "city" is actually more like a Disneyland park, except that their main focus is on to experiment with futuristic commercial ideas/concepts.

Here is the list of a few companies that co-invest with Toyota:

- Nissin (Instant food company) to "Create and evaluating food environments to inspire new 'food cultures'".

- UCC (Japanese coffee maker) to "Explore the potential value of coffee through futuristic cafe experiences".

- Daikin Industries (Air conditioner manufacturer) to "Experiment with 'pollen-free spaces'".

I don't know exactly what they are trying to test (I guess that they don't know either), but it's meant to be an industrial theme park than a real city with municipal authority.

>The future is expensive

Although upfront cost for city construction is probably negligible compared to the operating cost over the lifespan of the city. If you have even modest labour, infrastructure and service savings every year for decades to come building smarter probably pays off.

To be fair, 'Daisuke Toyoda, an executive in charge of the project from the automaker’s founding family, stressed it’s not “a smart city.”'.

It’s more like a small scale real life testing ground. Not a city but maybe meant to prove technology and design that can scale to a city. Toyota hasn’t had a great track record with alternative mobility historically - just some quirky experiments - so I’m curious what they’re working on that justified this big investment for this “city”.

Smallest official city in the UK is St. Davids, with ~1,750 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Davids

The UK definition of a city is arbitrary and unrelated to the usual meaning of the word. St Davids is objectively a small town.

Indeed. Southend was given city status in 2022 simply because their MP was murdered.

Croydon is twice the size of Southend and will probably never become a city.

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