The introduction of the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in Japan, such as Toyota’s establishment of a mobility business joint venture with Softbank, and the announcement by a major complete vehicle manufacturer and a major IT company that they are teaming up to commercialise the concept, have made ‘MaaS’ a power word for a while The current situation is that it has not attracted as much attention as it did at one time.

Currently, it is not attracting as much attention as it once did, and there is no growing momentum for the full-scale introduction of MaaS and smart cities that incorporate MaaS into urban policy in Japan. The focus is on how to monetise MaaS for full-scale diffusion, but solutions to this problem have been slow to materialise. To find the answer, FOURIN spoke to Sonics, a software start-up specialising in MaaS and smart cities, about what the bottlenecks are for the spread of MaaS in Japan and the path to widespread adoption.

In addition to Sonics, other Japanese companies include Daikyo Nishikawa, which is making advanced efforts to improve development efficiency through MBD collaboration with OEMs and suppliers, AISING, which is working on digitising manufacturing through edge AI, and Universal Robot, a cooperative robot manufacturer from Denmark. There are cutting-edge frontline initiatives in mobility services, DX, etc., which are of interest to the automotive industry.