Disclosure: WardsAuto accepted travel and lodging, paid by Toyota, in order to attend this invitation-only event. Toyota had no direct influence over this story. Dive Brief: - At a recent event serving as a first open house for Toyota Motor Corporation’s Woven City mobility test ground, in Japan near Mount Fuji, the automaker revealed its AI Vision Engine, a large-scale AI foundational vision language model that brings together visual, behavioral and environmental data. - Toyota claims the AI Vision Engine is capable of identifying patterns, detecting potential risks and enabling coordinated action across connected systems to improve safety. It’s set to be a core building block for the automaker’s next-generation Anzen driver-assist systems and Arene software platform for millions of software-defined vehicles produced in a wide range of configurations. - Toyota sees commercialization of the AI Vision Engine beyond cars. It employs AI to understand and analyze video data and is being trained from scratch, and Toyota says it might also be applied to retail environments, airports or offices. Dive Insight: At the Woven City event, attended by WardsAuto, Toyota further touted the capabilities and versatility of its AI Vision Engine, which was built entirely in-house by Woven by Toyota, the automaker’s software subsidiary. The automaker noted in a release that it’s one of the world’s leading VLMs, as ranked by MVBench Leaderboard. And while Toyota’s software unit had cars and mobility in mind when it developed the AI Vision Engine, it sees applications well beyond that. The AI Vision Engine is capable of understanding the behavior of people, objects and mobility through camera footage, Woven says. But it does not employ facial recognition. What distinguishes it from other VLMs, officials explained at Woven City, is that it can quickly summarize what is happening from camera video, report on what