The e-Palette is a symbol of Toyota's transformation into a mobility company. We asked its chief developer about the latest efforts toward a public rollout.
What’s happening at Woven City?
Unlike conventional cars, the e-Palette must be adaptable to the needs of different users and environments. As Muta explains, that’s why the various trials currently underway are so important.
Muta
At the Miyata Plant, for example, our main aim is to explore the role that e-Palettes can play in a vast factory space closed off from public roads.
At Fuji Speedway, we run them as shuttle buses during racing events.
Since attendees include people using wheelchairs and strollers, it is also a testing ground for creating a society where everyone can enjoy freedom of mobility.
At the same time, we have Woven City, which is being built as a living laboratory. The goal there is to explore the possible ways that the e-Palette might become part of people’s everyday lives.
At the Higashi-Fuji Technical Center, we are currently preparing for tests at Woven City by honing the autonomous driving to ensure it runs as comfortably as an expert driver, including smooth acceleration, deceleration, and cornering.
Besides this, e-Palettes are used as employee shuttles within the grounds of the head office’s engineering division. Operating the service over a long period has helped to identify various challenges.
Toyota has also run trials at Expo 2005 Aichi Commemorative Park (also known as Moricoro Park) in Nagakute, Aichi, with a view to “creating value through new mobility experiences” (Jan 29 – Feb 5, 2024).
The e-Palettes—fitted with transparent window displays, projectors for showing images on the ceiling, an immersive 3D sound system, seats that vibrated in time with the visuals and audio, scent-emitting devices, and even cameras that tracked passengers’ gestures—took members of the public on a 2.1 km route around Moricoro Park.
The onboard experience, entitled “Isekai Travel,” engaged all the senses with content synched to locations and views within the park, putting beaming smiles on the faces of young riders.
The expanding circle of like-minded partners and mobility potential
A key challenge to the widespread adoption of the e-Palette is creating the necessary partnerships, something Muta is pursuing alongside the various trials.
Muta
We are working to broaden and diversify our circle of partners, from developing business schemes around the e-Palette to organizing workshops for discovering new ideas.
On each occasion, we receive incredible ideas that far exceed our own imaginations, which makes me feel that the possibilities for the e-Palette, and hence future mobility, will only keep growing.
Some of the ideas certainly present challenges, such as the need for more space than the e-Palette can offer or something more compact.
But they only come about thanks to the e-Palette, and we want to use the current vehicle as a starting point for creating second and third iterations.
To date, Toyota has showcased various uses for the e-Palette, ranging from a convenience store and a café lounge to a fashion boutique.
What sort of ideas and projects are being cooked up with outside partners?
Muta
While I can’t give specifics for contractual reasons, one approach is to outfit the e-Palette with various goods or services and bring these to customers, as in the examples we’ve already mentioned.
We are also receiving inquiries from theme parks and other facilities looking to create mobility value like the trials in Moricoro Park.
When the e-Palette was unveiled at CES in 2018, Toyota announced that it would aim to test services in various regions. How is the progress on that front?
Muta
Because e-Palettes incorporate many cutting-edge technologies, we are conducting wide-ranging checks and assessments to ensure they can be used with confidence once out on the market.
We are not yet set up for mass production, meaning issues such as cost need to be addressed. That said, the entire team is working to get the e-Palette out there as soon as possible, to expand the potential of mobility and transform our cities. We can all look forward to that day.
In the second part of this article, we peek inside Toyota Motor Kyushu's Miyata Plant to see how those trials are unfolding.