Toyota Agile Space – Motorized Store or Mobility Company?

While retail self-admittedly isn’t Toyota’s core business, it does have some expertise in mobility and space optimization.

Toyota is claiming that in a “transformational shift to a mobility company,” it is exploring future ways to expand its services by pioneering and testing Toyota Agile Space (TAS), which will pilot a moving a retail application beginning this June.

Toyota Motor North America R&D has selected digital brand Cuyana as its first tenant. About the only thing AutoInformed sees in common with its vehicle business is that leasing could be involved for customers.

Cuyana will test the TAS concept as a portable retail showroom in southern California and promote its brand and products in different venues without the need of long-term commercial lease contracts. The traveling showroom will operate in five locations across Los Angeles and Orange counties from June to December 2021. A schedule is available at https://www.cuyana.com/.

While retail self-admittedly isn’t Toyota’s core business, it does have some expertise in mobility, space optimization and just-in-time production. ITL, aka InfoTech Labs which is part of R&D, believes those proficiencies delivered through the TAS concept can be a value-add for retail. Researchers at ITL imagine the creation of a two-way marketplace, one in which retailers can promote their products and brands in new environments while landlords can leverage and monetize underused space – a win-win situation for both retailers and landlords.

“The TAS concept can help make the retail ecosystem more dynamically responsive to consumer needs.  With a more agile retail space, retailers can more freely enter a broader array of venues and test out locations without committing to them long term. Landlords can experiment with a greater variety of brand and service options to draw foot traffic, which is often a challenge in traditional brick-and-mortar retail environments. Consumers are the biggest winners by getting the best possible retail experience,” said ITL.

Applying TAS in other applications

The Cuyana pilot will measure opportunity for changing ways land and space are used, configured and transacted. Beyond this retail trial, ITL hopes the TAS platform might be applied to other usage applications, such as space for municipal services, childcare, offices and healthcare services.

“Our role for Toyota is to be futurists, asking what societal problems need to be solved, and then designing future mobility solutions around them,” said Akio Orii, vice president at Toyota Motor North America R&D and head of InfoTech Labs (ITL). “In this application, we see many brick-and-mortar retailers forced to close their doors and retail landlords having underutilized space, so we pioneered an experiential solution that gives rise to a leaner, more flexible retail model in the physical world.”

InfoTech Labs

InfoTech Labs (ITL) is a part of Toyota Motor North America R&D “helping to realize future mobility solutions to address societal problems in the real world by innovative ways to utilize benefits of cutting-edge information technologies. Its work is focused on improving the experience of mobility, exploring changes in societal needs and people’s behavior. ITL utilizes the resources of vehicles, infrastructure and emergent technologies to provide tangible benefits to the public, enabling stress-free mobility of people and goods and delivering differentiated experiences through deep personalization.” ITL is based in Mountain View, CA.