The Beijing Auto Show is currently taking place in China, offering those of us behind the Trump tariff curtain a peek at what's increasingly being dubbed the world's most advanced car market. Chinese EVs leave everyone else in the dust, we're told, with infotainment that makes your smartphone look like a StarTac, range numbers that would make a turbodiesel Audi weep, and charging that might be even faster than filling up with gas, depending on the size of your tank.

As an American, I mostly have to take someone else's word for that. If there's one thing Democratic politicians can agree on with Republicans, even now, it's that they don't want cars from Chinese automakers on US roads. Toward the end of his administration, President Joe Biden levied a 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs. Under the Biden and then Trump administrations, Congress passed a law restricting the sale of Chinese-linked connected car software in the US. President Trump has added further tariffs to Chinese imports, making their cars even less competitive here. And just this week, more than 70 Democratic representatives called for maintaining barriers to Chinese cars for both national security and economic reasons.

This puts those elected officials increasingly out of step with popular sentiment on the Internet (I'm using the Ars comments and social media platform Bluesky as my bellwethers). From what I can see, there's strong appetite for those sweet, cheap Chinese electric vehicles. Headlines like Reuters' claim that "[f]or the average price of a car in the US, you could buy 5 new Chinese EVs" only reinforce that sentiment.

And why wouldn't people want them? The average price of a new vehicle in the US in 2025 rose to $50,326 by year's end. That's up from ~$40,000 in 2020 and $35,000 in 2015. (Those numbers are for the mean; the medians are slightly less, but the difference is not great.)

Despite the sharp increase in 2020 caused by the pandemic and its associated supply shortages, average sales prices appear to have risen relatively linearly over time, according to Cox Automotive's data set. And according to Federal Reserve data, wages have also grown steadily (much of it in the lower four quintiles during the Biden administration).

The auto show might be dead in the US and Europe, but it's apparently alive and kicking in China. Credit: Ju Huanzong/Xinhua via Getty Images

But for most of the 2010s, interest rates were zero or close to it; today, they very much are not. So financed purchases feel even more expensive than the raw inflation statistics would suggest. And it's exacerbating as, according to the Fed, American car buyers are borrowing twice as much as they did in 2009, and for longer. Consumer advice orgs like Edmunds might suggest a 60-month loan, but many car buyers are now financing vehicles over 72 or 84 months to keep their monthly payments down.

No wonder buying a car feels increasingly unaffordable.

Some of the concerns are legitimate

Much of the opposition from lawmakers has been framed in terms of protecting domestic jobs. These are not entirely spurious fears: 952,000 people work in motor vehicle and parts manufacturing in the US, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some work for Ford and General Motors and the cluster of Stellantis brands we still think of as domestic. But European, Japanese, and Korean automakers also employ tens of thousands of workers, not to mention Tesla and the other startups. There's even more work for suppliers further up the parts chain.

Those jobs are indeed at risk if China were to flood the US with cheap imports. China has been directly subsidizing its green industries to dominate those in Europe and the US (above and beyond the kinds of consumer-facing incentives that the EU and, until recently, the US, also provide). But the advantages of the Chinese car industry go far beyond that. Chinese average wages are a quarter of those in the US, and being able to throw more workers at a factory while still keeping overheads lower than your rivals gives Chinese OEMs a cost advantage. Even more favorable financing terms with suppliers, or not having to pay to license foreign intellectual property, gives them a real boost, according to analysts.

That's why the European Central Bank blamed Chinese competition for causing 240,000 job losses, many of them in the auto industry. There's plenty of alarm sounding from industry executives right now, too. Ford CEO Jim Farley, who spent months driving Chinese cars daily, said last week that there's enough excess capacity in China's car industry to easily swallow the 12 million or so cars currently bought each year in the US. And Koji Sato, outgoing president and CEO at Toyota, warned last month that Japanese automakers were doomed unless they could learn to match the speed of innovation of their new Chinese competitors.

The other stated reason for blocking Chinese cars is the threat to privacy and national security. Again, there are valid concerns here. Just ask the Chinese government, which stopped allowing Teslas to drive near its military bases and other sensitive locations more than five years ago, although that ban was recently dropped after Tesla began complying with Chinese data-security rules. Among those rules? For almost a decade, Chinese automakers have had to hand over copious amounts of data on their customers' driving habits to their government.

Are we getting the whole story?

For all the breathless coverage we read (or see on TikTok or Reels, perhaps), it's very rarely mentioned that those Chinese EVs aren't nearly as cheap when they're imported into Europe. Yes, they're undercutting the competition, but once the cars have been specced to meet European expectations, they might cost more than double their Chinese retail price. So the cars are a few thousand euros or pounds cheaper than established alternatives, but they're hardly the bargains the Internet has promised you.

The <a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/04/a-small-cheap-ev-you-cant-buy-in-the-us-we-test-the-byd-dolphin/">BYD Dolphin</a> might start at under $14,000 in China, but in the UK, the cheapest one will cost twice that—before you factor in the 20 percent VAT. Just something to consider. Credit: Cyril Marcilhacy/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Did I mention that those Chinese prices have been kept artificially low thanks to a price war among China's hundreds of car companies, driven by government policies that incentivized overproduction?

That price war is mostly over now at the behest of the Chinese government, but the overproduction problem is quite real: China has the capacity to build about 45 million cars a year; last year, it built about 34 million cars, and fewer than half were sold domestically. The flood of Chinese car exports to the rest of the world does not stem from some kind of altruistic intention from President Xi Jinping to increase global mobility.

Those inexpensive cars are also cheap because they make do with small batteries, and the range numbers are based on China's CLTC test. That bears little resemblance to the EPA's testing, which remains the closest approximation of real-world efficiency for EVs.

Let's be clear: Short-range EVs have been a sales disaster in the US. It's ludicrous to pretend otherwise. This country's car buyers' obsession with being able to drive 300 miles uninterrupted, then stop for five minutes before covering another 300 miles, is undeniable. It's also why every automaker selling a car here now puts such a large, heavy, and expensive battery pack between the wheels of their respective EVs. There's a reason the Model S made as much of an impact as it did in 2012—200 miles of range was unheard of. Likewise, when the Chevy Bolt hit the street in early 2017 with a legit 238 miles for a fraction of the price, it was a significant achievement.

The small, short-range EVs that predate or co-existed alongside those—let's call them second-gen lithium-ion EVs that began with the Model S—were compliance cars, offering maybe 150 miles of range on a good day. Unsurprisingly, America turned its nose up at them. The gas-powered Smart Car didn't even suffer from an EV's long recharging times or higher purchase price, and no one can credibly pretend those were a sales success here, either.

The marketeers might have pushed people from sedans to SUVs, but they're not responsible for an environment in which every street has to be wide enough for two fire engines—that's on your local fire department and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

Policies can push things the other way. Kei cars are popular in Japan not because of an inherent preference for tiny cars but because you can't buy a car in Japan without having a parking space for it, and a tiny Kei-sized space is much cheaper than one large enough for a compact car by European, American, or Chinese standards. I recently contacted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to see if there's been any movement on the Trump edict to bring them to US roads but have not heard back for a couple of weeks now.

This is what you want?

Then there are the cars themselves. Again, I'm mostly judging customer sentiment by 12+ years of reader comments and from what people post on social media, but I had thought we agreed that car interfaces that rely almost entirely on touchscreens are not a positive industry trend. They save OEMs time and money, but a touch interface is unequivocally less safe than buttons, which have to be individually homologated and individually assembled, and in this smartphone age, I certainly don't think the front seat passenger needs a whole extra screen just for them.

But that's what Chinese OEMs are offering, and that's what we're told rivals the invention of the presliced breadloaf in the grand discussion of "best things." Think of every trend in the automotive industry of the last decade that you hate, and you'll probably find plenty of it baked into new Chinese EVs. (On the other hand, LED headlights that also work as movie projectors are kinda cool—not gonna lie.)

Are we truly crying out for even more of a smartphone experience in our cars? I don't know about you, but when I'm behind the wheel, it's a guaranteed time of day when I can't and won't be doomscrolling. If the point is to give me something to do while I'm charging, why won't the phone I already have work?

And that's before the vehicles are crammed full of AI. Chinese automakers have become a new vanguard in the nation's latest five-year plan, with a "revolution" spanning design and production, as well as in-car features like letting you give vague, natural-language directions instead of specifying a specific destination.

One might think that last bit of news would land like a lead balloon among communities with a high degree of disgust for AI. Then again, perhaps not. Principles like solidarity with workers or a commitment to road safety or being distrustful of AI are easy to maintain in the abstract if all they require is the occasional post on the Internet or social media.

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Tucked away in the shadow of Mount Fuji about 70 miles southwest of Tokyo is Woven City. No, this is not a community made from fibers, but a living company town where Toyota and its partners are assembling a range of technologies and testing them on the residents. Woven City was initially announced at CES in 2020 on the eve of a global pandemic and phase one was completed five years later. Last week, Toyota flew us across the Pacific to find out just what they were stitching up in Woven City.

The name of this new community is both a callback to the company’s origins as the Toyoda Automatic Loomworks and reference to what the automaker is trying to do. The place is multiple things at once, a town, a technological and psychographic proving ground, and an incubator for new ideas. One of the themes of Woven City is “kakezan,” a Japanese word meaning multiplication. All aspects of the city are being woven together into an ecosystem for what communities of the future might look like, attempting to multiply and create a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

The big unanswered question at this point is whether that whole will be a bold vision of what future safer, more convenient communities could become; a dystopian nightmare that Alex Karp could only dream of; or just Akio’s folly. Let’s take a look at what Woven City looks like.

What is Woven City?

Woven City sits on the site of the former Toyota Motor East Japan Higashi-Fuji factory. Between 1967 and its closing in 2020, the plant produced more than 7.5 million vehicles including the tiny Sports 800 sports car, Corollas and the Century luxury sedan. Of the original factory buildings, only the stamping plant survives which has been transformed into the ‘inventor’s garage.’ The rest of the site has been turned into a test area called ‘inventor’s field’ and two phases of the residential portion where the weavers live. The inventors and weavers are the two core groups of people at Woven City.

There is much about Woven City that is not entirely new, but Toyota has combined several aspects that normally don’t co-exist – the creator community (aka the inventors) and a residential group (the weavers) so that they can interact and create a feedback loop.

The Inventor’s Garage

The core of the stamping plant was preserved in a way that invokes its heavy industrial past and looks to the future. All of the stamping presses were removed, apart from one small prototyping press that was kept in its pit with a glass floor above it. Next to that is the pit where a giant press that knocked out body sides used to sit. It has been transformed into a 200-seat theater for presentations. The concrete sides remain, cleaned up as much as the crews could, but still stained by decades worth of die lubricant that soaked into the concrete. Up above, the old skylights and ceiling cranes that moved the multi-ton dies in and out of the presses are still there.

Other parts of the building have been transformed into maker spaces, test labs, design studios and collaborative workspaces. In many respects, the Inventor’s Garage is very similar to other facilities such as NewLab Detroit that Ford created in the old school book depository that sits next door to Michigan Central Station. NewLab now has over 100 startups in residence working on a wide variety of projects from urban EV charging, to drones and electric RVs. Since it opened last fall, the Woven Inventors Garage has become home to 20 groups of inventors with four more announced on the day we visited.

Many of the initial inventor groups are from within various parts of the Toyota Group, but there are an increasing number of outside partners that were announced during our visit including the AI Robot Association, Dai Ichikosho (a commercial karaoke services supplier), Joby Aviation, and Toyota Financial Services, bringing the total to 24 partners so far.

The other main group at Woven City are the weavers. These are the residents living in the community. At the moment there are about 100 people living in 55 households made up of Toyota Group employees and their families, including some children. The eventual goal is to have about 2,000 weavers in the community. They are called weavers, because they are integrating the products and services of the inventor group and into the ecosystem they live in, ultimately with the whole of multiplying it all into something greater than the sum of the parts.

During the week of our visit, Woven City held the Kakezan 2026 event where the inventors were showing off what they were working on, several of which have come out of Woven by Toyota (WbyT). This is a business unit of the group that is responsible for much of the advanced technology development including the development of the city. One of the key parts of WbyT is Arene, the software development team.

Arene is responsible for developing the platform that powers new software defined vehicles from Toyota as well as all of the tools and processes to make this a reality. The first products of Arene’s efforts have already reached production in the form of the new infotainment software and Toyota Safety System 4 driver assists that launched on the 2026 RAV4. Both of these systems were developed in-house by Arene and support full over-the-air software update capability.

According to Jean-Francois Campeau, SVP of Woven and head of Arene, the group does much more than just the software development. They’ve observed the challenges that most legacy automakers have had with modern software development and worked to implement an entirely new organization and processes as well as tools that facilitate agile development. While it’s too early to tell how successful Arene has been, so far we’re not hearing of any of the sort of catastrophic issues that other automakers have had in recent years. Over time, future vehicles will continue to transition to a full Arene-developed software platform that abstracts all of the functions away from the underlying hardware.

The Woven AI Vision Engine

But Arene is doing much more than just the in-vehicle software. It’s also responsible for much of the software at Woven City. This includes the new Woven AI Vision Engine, which is a full vision language model based on an internally developed foundation model. While this is based on similar transformer technology to the chat bots we’ve become familiar with in the last few years, it’s trained on sensor data rather than just the internet’s body of text.

It’s designed to absorb data from cameras and other sensors and try to make sense of the world and make decisions based on the context and behavior of the actors it “sees.” As expected, this is going to be powering the next generation of assisted and automated driving systems on Toyota and Lexus vehicles, but Arene has designed it to do far more.

As we walked around phase 1 of Woven City, the first thing we noticed was some really interesting architecture with nice details, especially using wood and lots of greenery. But looking closer, you also start to see cameras – a lot of cameras, everywhere. Some of this is because this is both a place where people are living and working, but it’s also a testing ground.

For example, Toyota is testing collaborative perception systems which use infrastructure based sensing to expand situational awareness for vehicles and drivers. No matter how many sensors you put on a vehicle, those sensors are inherently limited to line of sight. They can’t see around corners of buildings or even past the vehicle in front.

The National Transportation Safety Board recently issued its investigation report into a pair of fatal crashes of Ford vehicles with BlueCruise. In one case the Mach-E in hands-free mode struck a stopped vehicle in the same lane after another vehicle that had been between them pulled over into the adjacent lane. The Ford never braked, but also may not have had enough time to respond because it wasn’t aware of the stopped vehicle.

Another recent incident involved a Waymo robotaxi striking a young child who ran out from behind a parked car. The Waymo detected the girl when she became visible, but by then it was too close to come to a full stop.

Both of these situations might (emphasizing might) have been avoided if infrastructure based sensing had provided information to the vehicles about hazards that were initially out of line of sight. That’s one of the things that Arene is evaluating at Woven City. Similarly, external sensing might detect other hazards or blockages and automatically reroute transit or automated vehicles to avoid gridlock or pre-emptively control traffic signals to aid emergency vehicles.

But there’s also a dark side to all of this that I’ll come back to later.

AI That Pauses Itself With Integrated ANZEN

The Japanese word for security or safety is Anzen and the Arene team has incorporated AI in an interesting way to enhance safety – specifically to make the driver safer by avoiding distractions from AI. The integrated Anzen system is using in-vehicle sensing help detect the driver’s mental and physiological state of mind. Many Toyota vehicles already include an infrared driver monitor camera mounted on the steering column and some also have capacitive sensors in the steering wheel. Pretty much all new vehicles also have torque sensors on the steering column.

With these sensors the Anzen system develops a baseline model of each driver over time and then tries to detect the driver’s state in real time based on where they are looking, eye gaze, head position as well as what they are doing with their hands. As the driver’s mental/physical state score increases, such as when they need to make a difficult turn or merge onto a highway, it may eventually cross a threshold. When that happens, the in-vehicle interactions with the driver such as navigation prompts or other voice interactions are automatically paused until the driver’s score drops back below the threshold.

Toyota demonstrated this with a vehicle in a simulation environment. As the driver approached certain situations and the score spiked, the voice system in the vehicle automatically paused until that situation passed. It’s unclear how reliable this system will be in the real world with many drivers that have different responses to stimuli, but there are many companies using in-vehicle sensors to provide a more robust detection of the driver’s state of mind and some of those could be integrated by Toyota to give a more reliable system. In the previously mentioned NTSB BlueCruise report, one of the key recommendations was to improve the reliability of driver attention monitoring so this may be a step in that direction.

Shared Vehicles and Virtual Power Plants

Another benefit of a planned community like this, where enhancing mobility is a target, is that you can build around ideas that hopefully lead to better outcomes for everyone. Toyota is providing the entire community with a shared fleet of bZ electric crossovers and e-Palette shuttles. Since the residences are all apartment style buildings more like what you’ll find in most urban Japanese and Asian cities, parking needs to be somewhat remote. The Woven City team has built a parking garage that incorporates rooftop solar charging, bidirectional charging and a software platform that transforms it all into a virtual power plant (VPP).

When someone needs a vehicle to go somewhere, they can use the Woven City app and request a car. An autonomous tow vehicle–called the Guide Mobi–then brings the vehicle to the driver’s location. The Guide Mobi is designed to be used for a variety of applications including being a general utility vehicle for making deliveries, use by grounds keepers and more. But the summon capability is particularly interesting.

The Guide Mobi is equipped with cameras, radar and lidar to help ensure safe operation in all conditions. The lidar in particular is obviously not on most vehicles today and adds cost. The Guide Mobi stops in proximity to the vehicle about to be delivered and connects via wifi. It then acts as a wireless tow vehicle, using its sensors to safely “tow” the bZ to the location of the driver. When a driver returns from their trip, they can exit by their building and another Guide Mobi will arrive to “tow” the vehicle back to the parking garage.

The virtual towing idea is far from a new one. I got a demonstration of the same idea from Honda at the ITS World Congress in 2014, although in that case the tow vehicle was being driven by a human.

Once parked and plugged in, the fleet of vehicles are charged at least partially from the solar array. They also act as an energy storage system for the whole community. These can help reduce peak loads on the grid and provide some stored solar power during the night. When coordinated with the utility, the VPP can even provide power back to the grid to help maintain balance at peak load times. The entire energy management system has been developed internally at Toyota and it’s currently targeted toward fleet operators. However, it could also be scaled, eventually enabling individual households to participate in providing grid support.

Swake and e-Palette

The bZ fleet is primarily targeted at transportation needs outside of Woven City. Within the community, there are the e-Palette shuttles which can accommodate up to 17-passengers. These were first shown as concepts at the 2019 CES and can be used for more than just moving people. In the early stages of Woven City, the e-Palettes are manually driven, but Toyota and its partners such as May Mobility are also testing automated versions and these will eventually be deployed here as well.

Toyota is also testing e-Palette as a service where the shuttles can be equipped with a variety of interior upfits. We saw one that was a mobile coffee shop, another set up as a convenience store, and a third was a mobile office space with a work table and a large screen for presentations. Inside the inventors hub building in phase 1, there was a full-size mockup that can be used to test various upfit combinations and system integration.

The other primary method of getting around besides walking is the Swake. This is a personal mobility device designed by Toyota. It’s basically a stand-up three-wheeled scooter, but it leans into turns and has a backrest that riders can lean on for added support. The batteries are swappable and provide about 20 miles of range. It’s not an entirely new concept, Toyota seems to have executed it quite well and while we didn’t have a chance to ride one on the rainy afternoon we spent touring the city, the employees who demo’d the Swake seemed to be having a good time.

During the construction of Woven City, the crews also built an underground tunnel network that can be used for pickups and deliveries as well as maintenance access. The Guide Mobi vehicles are the primary means for moving items through the tunnels.

Fully Monitored UCC Coffee Shop

One of the fascinating aspects of Japan is the prevalence of vending machines almost everywhere. Walk around Tokyo or other cities and you’ll find banks of vending machines that dispense almost anything. Among those, many sell coffee in cans, a concept that was pioneered by the Ueshima Coffee Company or UCC in 1969. UCC also has a chain of more traditional coffee shops throughout Japan. UCC is one of the inventor partners for Woven City.

One slightly less traditional UCC coffee shop exists in Woven City. Walking in, it all looks pretty normal, you walk up to the counter, order your drink and/or snacks and then sit down. However, if you sit in the back part of the shop, and you look up at the ceiling, you’ll see more of those tell-tale half domes that contain the cameras. But these aren’t just there for security to keep tabs on over-caffeinated teen hooligans that might be looking to cause some trouble.

The cameras at the UCC shop are there to monitor the behavior of customers as they drink their coffee or tea and are backed up by the aforementioned AI Vision Engine. To me, this is one of the first real instances where I see Woven City’s use of AI perhaps steering into the nefarious zone. Once a customer sits down with a drink, the type of drink is known and the behavior of the customer is recorded and analyzed. Is the customer just sitting there resting? Do they seem tired? Are they going to work on a laptop? How much are they seeming to concentrate? How long do they stick around? UCC wants to know what the response is as part of their market research.

Weavers in Woven City know they are being tracked and they have given their consent before moving in. But this is all something that might not go over as well in another location. And given potential for bias from a self-selected group of participants, it’s not clear how useful the results will actually be. Only time will tell.

The City Itself

There are going to be countless experiments run at Woven City in the coming months and years. But what does the town itself look like? From an architectural perspective, it’s actually quite attractive and modern. There are no single-family homes, but the apartment buildings are all about four to six stories tall and each level is terraced back and features some green space that gives it an inviting feel. In phase 1, the residential buildings are arranged around a central courtyard with common space for people to gather and children to play. The buildings are primarily concrete and glass, but there are other materials worked in, including wood.

The first hundred residents are all employees of Toyota group companies and their families. Going forward, WbyT wants to bring in more people from partner companies and even outsiders to eventually get to about 2,000 residents. There are other buildings including a welcome center, some commercial space and the inventors hub. The hub is separate from the inventor’s garage and is a space where inventors can interact with the weavers and get direct feedback on projects they are working on. One of the four new inventors, Joby has already installed a simulator for its upcoming e-VTOL aircraft.

Another is a prototype vending machine from DyDo, a manufacturer of many of the machines already in use across Japan. However, unlike traditional machines, this has no indications of what it contains, or a window to see what products are on offer. There is just a bare white front with a dispensing slot at the bottom. Is it tied in to the Vision AI Engine to detect who is approaching and dispense their usual items automatically? No one present was quite sure how it worked. The unit in the inventor’s hub was covered in post-it notes from weavers providing feedback and while I don’t read Japanese, apparently they were not all praising the new design.

Say Hello to Akio-Bot

One of the most questionable demonstrations we saw was the Akio AI. Three years ago, Toyoda stepped down as company president and is now chairman of the company his grandfather started. As he approaches his 70th birthday, there was a desire to provide a way for employees to ask questions and get responses that reflect Akio-san’s views and approach to leadership. Thus a team created a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system based on a large language model.

They fed the RAG system all of the writings and speeches given by Akio-san for over a decade and began testing it. The goal of RAG is to only provide answers based on the corpus of data provided without making anything up. The system is designed to work with either text or voice input and for a demonstration they had a microphone set up that allowed users to ask questions of the Akio-bot. My friend Tim Stevens asked that since the president recently acknowledged being such a fan of Kei-cars would Toyota bring these little machines to America. The Akio AI gave a mostly non-commital answer that said it would not be easy and it wouldn’t be done because of one person, but only if Toyota felt there was a sufficient market to justify the investment.

Currently the Akio AI is accessible to Toyota employees through the company Slack although they are also working on a web app. Akio-san has been involved in evaluating the system and providing feedback on the responses so the development team can fine tune it. It’s unclear if the Akio AI will ever be made available to the general public.

There are a variety of other projects happening at Woven City including sidewalk delivery bots, a dynamic wireless charging system from Denso and an automated karaoke playlist generator, but the ones I’ve described here give you a pretty good picture of what WbyT is up to.

The Bottom Line

In the end, what is Woven City really all about? A lot depends on your perspective and whether you’re a glass-half-full or ⅞ empty type of a person. If we grant that Toyota only has the best intentions to make society better, safer and easier to get around, it’s a really fascinating approach to a proving ground for new technologies. There’s pretty much nowhere else that you’ll find an automaker test facility where people are actually living there with their families. At least everyone involved is a willing participant with informed consent (at least the adults are if not the children).

This is unlike what Tesla has done for the past decade with AutoPilot/FSD where they are putting beta safety critical software into the hands of untrained customers and seeing how it does on roads with hundreds of millions of people who gave no consent to being part of CEO Elon Musk’s experiment.

The darker side is that we also live in a world where entities like Palantir, Meta, ICE and Chinese government authorities all exist. If the infrastructure for continuous monitoring is there for positive reasons, there’s a good chance it may be utilized by less noble actors to try to control the populace. That’s the glass 7/8th empty scenario. [Ed note: See also: The Dark Knight – MH]

So far, at least in Asia, residents may be somewhat more willing to give up some information about their movements in exchange for the potential benefits of a safer environment. It’s always been apparent that powerful technologies in the hands of those with nefarious intentions can lead to very bad results. Coffee shops full of cameras with AI that detects how people are responding to coffee or what they are doing or a community with cameras and other sensors everywhere, just seems ripe for abuse.

WbyT CTO John Absmeier acknowledges that the group of weavers in Woven City are a somewhat self-selected group that are enthusiastic about the prospect of trying new things which may in turn lead to a bias about their feedback. That’s a prospect that Toyota is going to have to find a way to address so that the results of the testing are more valid.

There’s no guarantee how much if anything that we saw at Woven City will ever pass beyond its perimeter. There are some really cool elements like the parking garage VPP and the Guide Mobi system that are at worst benign but mostly really good. In a better world, this will make communities better places to live. But as I told Ford’s former futurist Sheryl Connelly in a conversation several years ago about my personal view of the world, “I’m hopeful, but not optimistic.”

As I’ve gotten older, my view has definitely skewed toward the not optimistic end of that statement. Hopefully, time will prove me wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post What It Was Like Inside Toyota’s Futuristic City, Where Every Resident Is A Beta Tester And An AI Version Of The Former CEO Gives Out Advice appeared first on The Autopian.

I haven’t been writing as much here over the last several weeks, because of multiple other writing commitments. Some of these are about to start bearing fruit. Substack posts will get easier now that the semester is coming to a close, but in the meantime, here’s a short piece to tide you over, and an opportunity for those as wants to take it up.

One of the pieces that is forthcoming (co-authored with Cosma Shalizi) relates indirectly to the theme of this Elias Isquith post. Elias draws a comparison between how AI figures like Altman talk about the future, and the bizarre homespun philosophy of Anton Chigurh, the killer in the movie, No Country for Old Men.1

in both cases, we have men positing that they have a unique grasp of the nature of the universe and the direction of human history. And at the risk of stating the obvious: This is not a small claim!

In another era, in another culture, this hubristic assertion of having discerned the golden path to the inevitable future would be grounds for charges of heresy or blasphemy. The egomania here is astounding, no less so than that of a character who fancies himself Fate (and/or Death) incarnate.

And in both cases, we are confronted with false prophets who are telling us, albeit in different registers, that human superfluousness is either already true (Chigurh) or inevitable (Altman). In the face of such monstrous certainty, despair would be understandable.

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I think that it is worth drawing out a difference between Chigurh and Altman that is hinted at in Elias’s indirect Dune reference. Chigurh’s philosophy is a cockeyed version of determinism, suggesting that we don’t have real choices going forward. Altman is drawing on a much stranger set of notions, which suggests that our present is not determined by our past, or by chance, but by a radically constrained version of the future. A lot of AI discourse reverses the arrow of time, so that instead of a fixed past and an indefinite future, we face a definite future, which directly or indirectly shapes its own past.

This follows from standard arguments about the Singularity. People who subscribe to middling-to-stronger versions of Singularity thinking believe that we are about to hit a massive phase-change in human history, which will have a dichotomous outcome. Once strong AI hits, either the machines master us, or we master the machines. The result is to render present concerns largely irrelevant, except insofar as our collective decisions make us more likely to follow the one path or the other. The AI 2027 paper provides a fine example of the genre.

And it is a genre; a concatenation of LessWrong posts, academic and sort-of-academic articles, think-tank thought pieces, Substack posts and the like, which not only build on a similar set of tropes, but also (and here is the point I want to emphasize) adopt a narrative structure that interprets the present only in terms of some posited near term future of radical transformation. It’s notable how significant elements of the mythology of the Singularity - things that people in this space don’t usually fully believe, but that often indirectly affect their thinking - describes direct intervention by some future that rearranges the past so as to ensure that it comes into being. Here, most obviously, Roko’s Basilisk (more generally; when one considers the collective fate of humanity as an exercise in applied game theory, backward induction may lead you to some very strange conclusions).

This famous quote from Nick Land is even more on point:

what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.

The obvious rebuttal is no: we actually can’t see the future of AI. We can’t even engage in the limited kinds of hedged predictions that we can make when we model reasonably well understood phenomena. The question, “How technology will develop in the future?” is an open ended one.. If innovation were predictable in its consequences, like the tech tree in Civilization, we’d be in a very different kind of history altogether than the history we are in.

What we can see are the outcomes of thought experiments. Thought experiments can be very useful as a means of thinking more systematically about unknowns. However, one shouldn’t overestimate what you can do with them. In the end, thought experiments are nothing other than moderately disciplined guesswork. When we mistake them for reliable predictions of what lies ahead, and reshape our world around what they say, we’re liable to end up in a mess, unless we are improbably brilliant, lucky, or both.

But we are in a world where many people - including very important policy makers - see a particular strain of thought experiments as being determinative. I don’t think that these people are stupid or wicked, but I am frustrated with how their arguments are driving out other ways of thinking (that may finally be changing now that concerns about economic disruption are coming to the fore, but it is changing much more slowly than I would like). That makes it much harder to see the enormous variety of futures that might be possible, depending on the choices we make and their consequences, both predictable and stochastic. Those possible futures are being devoured by thought experiments which have gone feral, and have spread like an invasive species from their proper environment into the realm of general discourse. That stunts democratic debate and understanding of the choices we do and don’t have.

Some version of this complaint informs the opening parts of a jointly written paper with Cosma Shalizi that should be out soon. You can plausibly read this classic post of his as yet another version of this complaint, which was aimed at an earlier version of this discourse. If we see the Singularity as having happened in the past, we can better understand the ways in which it is contingent, rather than extrapolating the eschaton from growth charts.

Enough griping: here’s the positive opportunity. The Protopian Prize competition for short fiction that imagines a democratic future is going to open up tomorrow. There will be a $5,000 prize for the winning entry, and I’m going to be one of the judges. While I wasn’t even slightly involved in setting up the prize, and the bit that I am concerned with is not about AI, the competition will surely generate a variety of different possible futures, all of which will start from an understanding of how or whether we can collectively steer towards one direction or another. That kind of steering, is, after all, what democracy involves. I don’t have any further particulars beyond what is on the website, and absolutely don’t want to suggest that people should write in one or another vein (the variety of possibilities seems to be the point) but do encourage you to enter. As per Elias’s post, I would like fewer thought experiments about how we have no or very few choices to make, and more thinking about how our future is not constrained to one or the other narrowly defined path.

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It’s amazing what can change in two years. In 2024, Canada moved quickly to match America’s 100 percent tariff rate on EVs made in China. Earlier this year, that tariff rate was relaxed under a new trading scheme. Under this quota system, as many as 49,000 Chinese-built EVs can enter the Great White North at a mere 6.1 percent tariff rate, and the first brand to take advantage of this is Lotus.

Yep, Lotus, the British sports car marque. While many North American enthusiasts will be familiar with the British-built Emira, the brand now builds a whole range of EVs in China thanks to Geely ownership. This technically isn’t the first time the Eletre SUV has been sold in North America, as it enjoyed a brief low-tariff stint before the weight of international trade concerns came barrelling down on it, but shifting tides in Canada make it a far more attractive proposition north of the border. The question is: How good is it, especially now that there’s a proper choice of posh performance-oriented electric SUVs in its price range? I spent a day in the range-topping Carbon Series to find out.

[Full disclosure: Lotus handed me the keys to an Eletre so long as I kept the shiny side up and reviewed it. They also gave an Atmos audio demonstration, followed by hosting an evening industry and client mixer for the local market relaunch. Transportation to and from was paid for by yours truly.] 

The Basics

Battery Pack: 112 kWh lithium-ion.

Drive: Dual-motor all-wheel-drive.

Output: 603 horsepower, optionally 905 horsepower on the Carbon Series.

DC Fast Charging: 350 kW, CCS connector.

Range: 460 km (285 miles) base, 385 km (239 miles) on the Carbon Series.

Base Price: $124,550 Canadian.

Price As-tested: TBA

Why Does It Exist?

From Formula 1 innovation to delightful sports cars, Lotus has an absolutely spectacular pedigree. Unfortunately, as with many small British sports car marques, it also has a history of financial instability. After the untimely death of company founder Colin Chapman, Lotus was owned by a consortium of British investors, followed by General Motors, followed by Bugatti EB110 mastermind Romano Artioli, followed by Malaysian automaker Proton. Nearly a decade ago, Chinese automaker Geely purchased a 51-percent controlling stake in Lotus, and it’s since sought expansion. It seems like Geely is seeking to adopt the old Porsche model, and after seeing what the Cayenne did for Stuttgart’s sports car company, the Eletre SUV has been tasked with achieving the same sort of sales success.

How Does It Look?

Right off the rip, the Eletre looks absolutely nothing like the sports cars of yore. How could it? We’re looking at a distinctly different form factor, although Lotus has been able to put its own twist on things. The aerodynamic channeling is wild, with large air curtains and flow-through ducts up front and huge wheel arch extractors out back that seem primed to shoot gravel should your right foot suddenly become leaden.

In a way, the functional ducts speak volumes about the look of the Eletre. It’s not traditionally handsome, but it’s certainly purposeful. Only time will tell if it can forge its own identity, but a few great colors certainly help. I mean, come on, just look at this green.

What About The Interior?

Slide behind the wheel of the Eletre, and you’ll immediately know why it commands a six-figure price tag. From the stitched dashboard to the carbon trim, the material spend feels massive. It also all feels remarkably well-screwed-together, with nary a stitch out of place. Lotus has huge luxury aspirations for this model, so it helps that pretty much none of the switchgear appears to be shared with anything else. The e-shifter moves with heft, the paddles for regenerative braking and drive mode selection offer beautiful tactility, even the recline switches for the rear seats have remarkably little shaft play. Speaking of seats, the front thrones are genuinely astonishing. The level of support is nigh-on perfect, and they’ll hug you like your favorite pair of jeans.

How Does It Drive?

At face value, the Eletre is the antithesis of “Simplify, then add lightness.” We’re talking two-chamber air suspension, more gadgets than a Best Buy, and a base curb weight of more than 5,600 pounds. The thing is, Lotus doesn’t just make sports cars. For decades, the chassis experts in Hethel have helped dozens of marques build better-driving cars, so if anyone can make a 2.5-ton SUV go around a corner, it’s these people. Surprise surprise, the inputs are all there. I’m talking beautifully weighted steering that builds effort with load naturally, air spring pressure, and damping that’s taut but never harsh, even in the Eletre’s most aggro mode. Then there’s the way this absolute unit communicates weight transfer. Instead of trying to completely eliminate body roll, Lotus has dialed in just enough to add feedback without eroding confidence. The result is the best-driving car of this weight class that I’ve ever experienced.

It’s remarkably easy to place on the road, both on tight city streets and when you want to get a bit cheeky with the apexes. You’re aware of what the tires are doing, and instead of feeling like it’s entering a boxing match with physics, the Eletre exhibits remarkable malleability. It loads up and rotates with a surprising degree of confidence, and it’s just as eager to settle down and shut out the world with plenty of suspension travel and high-grade sound insulation. Obviously, this is not a sports car in the same way that a rhinoceros is not a greyhound, but the top-flight Eletre proudly shows traits of a car you want to actively drive. What a lovely surprise.

So then, what about the other stuff? Well, every Eletre can see up to 350 kW of power through the right sort of DC fast charger, although the port on the car is of the CCS variety rather than the Tesla-style NACS port. The 905-horsepower Carbon Series model I drove isn’t exactly easy on electrons (it’s rated for just 385 kilometers or 239 miles of range), but 460 kilometers (285 miles) of range from the standard 604-horsepower models is right about on par with the similarly priced BMW iX M70 and Porsche Macan Electric 4S. Oh, and it comes with a full suite of advanced driver assistance systems. Job done on that, I reckon.

Does It Have The Electronic Crap I Want?

Aside from one key thing, a loaded Eletre will get you every gizmo you could possibly want. Massaging front seats, ventilated rear seats, an electrically dimming moonroof, soft-close doors, four-zone climate control, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, the works. You know what you don’t get, though? A volume knob. Instead, you have to either use the steering wheel controls or swipe down on the top of the infotainment screen to access a virtual slider. Bah humbug.

Speaking of sound, the top-shelf KEF audio system offers tremendously clean low-end extension and solid overall clarity, although Dolby Atmos support is still a bit of a gimmick for really keen audio enthusiasts. It does the immersive audio thing, but it’s currently limited to streaming, and that means you don’t get lossless quality, and the effective bitrate’s about half what you get from an old-school CD. Still, if you want to know the impact a front-mounted subwoofer has on soundstage, hop in a well-specced Eletre. It definitely warms the system up, but it also brings the action closer to you. Good stuff.

It’s also worth noting that the Eletre has the only good passenger screen I’ve ever encountered. Sure, functionality is limited to displaying relatively basic information like the time, key stats, and the current song playing, but it’s so wonderfully unobtrusive that it actually makes sense. Give whoever’s riding shotgun a little more information, but don’t bombard them with a billboard-sized fingerprint collector.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of screens, the infotainment system is incredibly slick, with the sort of fluidity you’d expect from an iPad. It’s not perfect—Apple CarPlay integration could use a little work, and I encountered the occasional minor glitch in the native system—but it’s rather promising. We’ve come a long way from the days of aftermarket-supplied head units in Elises and Evoras.

Three Things To Know About The Lotus Eletre

1. The build quality feels remarkably excellent.
2. It handles better than anything weighing 2.5 tons should.
3. It’s the first made-in-China EV sold in Canada under the new import cap scheme.

Does The Lotus Eletre Fulfil Its Purpose?

It depends on how you define the Eletre’s purpose. As a way of offsetting the carbon emissions of the Emira sports car in particularly sensitive markets, it goes above and beyond. Longer-range EVs exist and the dealer network is rather small, but the Eletre drives incredibly well for something weighing more than two-and-a-half tons and feels reassuringly posh.

Thanks to Canada opening up a quota program for Chinese-built EVs, the Eletre now starts at $124,550 Canadian, including a $4,650 freight charge. That’s about $8,000 Canadian less than the 650-horsepower BMW iX M70 xDrive, but about $12,000 Canadian more than the quicker Porsche Macan Electric 4S. Granted, it is much larger than the Porsche, although options do add up similarly quickly. Want soft-close doors, ventilated massaging seats, and configurable ambient lighting? Be prepared to spend an extra $10,000 Canadian on the Eletre Touring. Want the top-shelf 23-speaker audio system with the front subwoofer unit, active aero, and fancy pedals? That’s another $10,000 Canadian on top of the Eletre Touring, or $144,550 Canadian before options.

That’s still quite competitive, and while the Eletre is a European take on a Chinese-built EV, the fact that it rides on a variant of Geely’s SEA platform makes me excited for the future. Geely-owned Zeekr is actively hiring in Canada, and with BYD on Transport Canada’s approved importer list, it’s only a matter of time before I get behind the wheel of fully-Chinese EVs. If they’re anything like this, they’re going to be good.

What’s The Punctum Of The Lotus Eletre?

Regardless of where it’s made, this is one surprisingly fun luxury SUV.

Top graphic image: Thomas Hundal

 

 

The post The Lotus Eletre Is The First Chinese-Built EV Sold Under Canada’s Quota Program And It’s Shockingly Good appeared first on The Autopian.

There’s a critical lack of cheap new cars that are proud to be inexpensive these days. Everything’s aspirational, soft-touch, and as a result, expensive. However, as subcompact cars continue to disappear in America, they’re having a resurgence in Europe. Some 36 years after the original completed its illustrious 42-year lifespan, the Citroën 2CV is coming back.

Even though the original Citroën 2CV only made about 29 horsepower at most and was known for seemingly infinite body roll, it holds a special place in my heart. Designed with the brief of serving as an umbrella on four wheels and with a mission of cheap running costs and excellent ride comfort, it survived war and rationing and a near-decade-long delay to become a legend of post-war motoring. With its flip-up windows, canvas roof, and garden furniture seats, the 2CV was a tremendous expression of utilitarianism. This cheap, originally corrugated machine did exactly what it said on the tin, helped put France on wheels, and became a style icon in its own right.

Perhaps best of all, despite being bathed in austerity, the 2CV was still weird. It had an air-cooled engine at the front, a shifter that came out of the dashboard, and just three nuts holding on each wheel. Its interlinked suspension was genius, with horizontal coil springs connecting the leading and trailing arms on each side to offer a sort of fore-and-aft anti-pitch function. The van variant looked like it had reversed into a shed, the four-wheel-drive variant simply bunged another engine in the back, it was all so much charm in an affordable package. Jason owns one and I totally see why.

Today, Citroën isn’t as weird as it used to be. The marque hasn’t produced a grand hydropneumatically-suspended sedan in more than 13 years, and the funky door ding-mitigating air bumps on older models like the C4 Cactus have disappeared from the range. The Ami quadricycle still flies the flag, but for those who want more than eight horsepower or a top speed above 25 MPH, Citroën doesn’t make anything else that lets its freak flag fly. That’s about to change with the new 2CV.

Although all we have is a dim teaser photo, the resemblance is undeniable. From the proud round headlamps to the silhouette to the fenders, this is a modern interpretation of a 2CV and it seems to be doing things right. I mean, just look at the giant Citroën emblem on the nose, an unmistakable nod to early 2CV models. However, while the original 2CV featured an air-cooled flat-twin, the new 2CV is going electric.

[Editor’s Note: I’m so excited about this. I think what makes me most excited is that, unlike other recent rebirths of iconic old cars, like Volkswagen’s ID.Buzz, this new 2CV is keeping to the original mission of the car: cheap, basic, usable transportation. It’s hard to see what’s going on in this teaser, but I like generally what I see. It does look like that rear wheel is no longer skirted? You’d think in an EV you’d want that. I can’t wait to learn more. – JT]

Understandably, you can expect modest specifications from the new 2CV. While Citroën hasn’t said what range, maximum DC fast charging kW, or horsepower will be, it’s given the world the most important figure: The expected price. We’re talking an electric car built in Europe with a target price under €15,000. That’s under $17,500 at current conversion rates, and that’s including value added tax. Best of all, we won’t have to wait long to see what the new 2CV looks like. If everything goes according to plan, expect a reveal this October at the Paris Motor Show. Oh yeah, this is looking good.

Top graphic image: Citroën, Jason Torchinsky

The post The Dirt-Cheap Electric Reborn Citroën 2CV Is Almost Here And I’m So Stoked appeared first on The Autopian.