Why Is Toyota Developing Their Own Open Source Video Game Engine?!

Toyota is known for precisely one thing: manufacturing reliable cars. Sure, they do have their hands in some other industries, just like every other corporation of its size, but their business is cars and we can all agree on that. So, it came as a big surprise when I learned that Toyota is actively developing their own open source video game engine.

All of this information is courtesy of GameFromScratch and they deserve the credit for digging up this story, but I’ll relay the highlights to you here:

Toyota — Toyota Connected North America, specifically — gave a presentation at FOSDEM ’26 that introduced Fluorite, which is a “console-grade” 3D video game engine they’re developing. They didn’t explicitly say that it will be open source, but FOSDEM is an event for open source software development and so it is safe to say that Fluorite will be open source.

Fluorite is built on Flutter framework and allows for programming “game” code in Dart, with an underlying ECS (Entity-Component-System) architecture built on C++ to improve performance. That is particularly important for getting good performance on embedded hardware, which is critical to the goal.

The presentation claimed that Fluorite will provide “console-grade” 3D rendering. It will also feature a pretty nifty feature that lets 3D designers select geometry in Blender to use as a clickable button from any orientation.

That last feature gives us the context we need to answer the “why” question and is the reason I put game in quotes before: Toyota wants to use Fluorite to build user interfaces for in-car infotainment systems. As those become increasingly sophisticated and complex, pre-rendered graphics aren’t going to cut it. The Fluorite engine will let them create interfaces the render in real time based on user input and, presumably, data coming from the car.

Say, for instance, that you want to know the air pressure on the rear passenger tire. You could use a central infotainment screen to spin around a 3D model of your own car, tap on the tire, and see relevant data.

That’s cool as far as car tech goes, but it also has potential for the rest of us. If Toyota does release Fluorite as an open source engine, developers are sure to find interesting use cases outside of the automotive world.