This year marks 100 years since the founding of Toyota Industries, where the Toyota Group began.
It was founded to bring Sakichi Toyoda’s Type G Automatic Loom into wider use.
From a single thread, from the weaving of fabric, Toyota’s story first took shape.
Over time, it grew from looms into automobiles, and into a company that now serves people across Japan and around the world.
When I reflect on what has sustained Toyota through those 100 years, I do not think it was technology or capital alone. I think, at its heart, it was the simple desire to help others. To innovate, “For Others.”
So as we look to the next 100 years, what is it that we must carry forward?
I think it is exactly that. The history Toyota has built and the values that shaped it. Translating them into new ideas, new solutions, and ultimately into happiness and well-being for all.
That is why Woven by Toyota exists.
For Others
To innovate “For Others.”
We will build the future in ways that are faster, bolder and different from what came before, but always rooted in that core philosophy.
Today, we’re doing this much like a tugboat, helping pull Toyota forward through its transformation.
A tugboat may be small, but it is powerful enough to pull a much larger ship into the unknown.
That is the kind of role we hope to play in driving Toyota’s transformation into a mobility company.
Automated driving. Software-defined vehicles. New forms of movement that go beyond the traditional car are beginning to take shape. The world of mobility is changing faster than ever before.
Amid this wave of transformation, our role is to help lead Toyota in exploring what will become the new normal in another 100 years’ time.
We stand at the intersection of heritage and innovation. Past and future.
But what is that future we envision? To put it simply, it’s one where there are no more traffic accidents. Zero.
Until now, we have continued refining vehicle technologies and working to improve safety.
But, we came to understand that improving the performance of the car alone cannot get us to zero.
And that is why we have looked beyond the car.
People, vehicles, many different mobility technologies, and the infrastructure around them, must all be connected and work together to achieve our goal of zero traffic accidents in society.
Today, our work toward this future takes the shape of four key technologies.
First, Arene is our vehicle software platform. It is designed to make automotive software development faster, more seamless, and more continuous, from development and testing to deployment and improvement.
Over time, we believe Arene can become more than a vehicle platform. It can grow into a broader foundation for connecting people, mobility, and infrastructure.
Mobility is at the center of daily life. It connects people to places, services, and experiences. In that sense, it becomes more than transportation. It becomes part of the connective foundation of society itself.
Second, in automated driving, we are developing core technologies that support the full range of automated driving and driver assistance.
By combining Physical AI with our own proprietary Active Learning Loop, and by learning from Toyota-scale driving data together with partners, we aim to support mobility that delivers greater safety and peace of mind to people all around the world.
Third, Woven City is where we bring new ideas into form.
It is a place to test, refine and prove out ideas that have never existed before, and to turn ‘what ifs’ into something real and tangible.
Toyoda, our Head of Woven City, will speak more about that shortly.
And last but not least, our work in Cloud & AI. The foundation that supports everything we do.
It provides the infrastructure that makes our work possible, while also creating a space where engineers across regions, companies and industries can come together to collaborate and build the future side by side.
But none of this can be realized by one company or one technology alone.
Everything we are working on, every innovation we are pursuing, and our vision of a world with zero traffic accidents all depend on Kakezan (the multiplying power of combining diverse strengths)
As an engineer, I’m proud to have been involved in many breakthrough developments, and looking back, I believe all of them were born from various kinds of Kakezan.
And to tackle even larger and more complex breakthroughs in the future, I believe we need
Kakezan across society,
Kakezan across industries,
Kakezan across borders, bringing together different ideas, different experiences, and different ways of thinking.
Each of these becomes a thread. And those threads, woven together, will weave the next 100 years of Toyota.
Kakezan is also reflected in our new company logo.
It keeps our familiar hexagonal silhouette, while carrying forward the spirit we have held since our founding.
The six lines form three paths and represent people, mobility technologies, and infrastructure intersecting in the center.
The red: a nod to our Toyota heritage.
The gray: a balanced unification of diverse voices and ideas.
The black: a refined boldness of our execution phase.
The red of Toyota meets the black and gray “X”, symbolizing the multiplying power of Kakezan.
As everything weaves together, it represents new possibilities and the collective impact we strive to have on the world.
This logo was created with the thoughts and voices of all our employees.
At the final stage, we all came together to draw individual threads, then wove them together to complete it.
What you are seeing in the background now is part of that process.
It is our logo, everyone’s logo, and a symbol of the Kakezan we will continue driving together.
Our mission is this:
To challenge the current state of mobility through human-centric innovation.
We will not settle for the status quo.
We will take on what may seem impossible today.
We will keep looking ahead to what comes next.
To keep challenging the conventions of mobility is not only our mission. It is our commitment to ourselves.
As Toyota begins its next 100 years, we hope you will support us in this challenge.
Thank you very much.
