i-REAL unreal, but Toyota pushes on

It's half-wheelchair half-Dalek and it's halfway to production. Toyota's 'star' of the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show, the i-REAL personal mobility vehicle was expected by many to fade away, but two years down the track, the electrically-powered single-seat three-wheeler is now in limited institutional use in Japan and its creator says production versions are only three to five years away.

The Carsales Network sampled the multi-mode i-REAL in a small auditorium on the seventh floor of Toyota's central Tokyo AMLUX dealership on the eve of the 2009 Tokyo Motor Show on Tuesday. And while we can vouch for the vehicle's ease of use, we're still a long way from being convinced the oddly configured three-wheeler has any more than novelty value to the wider community.

The i-REAL is the latest generation of a number of Toyota advanced concepts including i-unit and i-swing. The product of a small cadre of Toyota engineers and teams from its various suppliers, the vehicle offers Walking mode, which places the operator upright and at normal eye-level, and Cruise mode in which the three-wheeler lowers the user, increasing its wheelbase in the process, and can power along, leaning into corners at its top speed of 30km/h. An Escort mode enables the user to 'park' the vehicle once out of the seat. It also interacts with other i-REALs to allow users theoretically to track nearby friends and rendezvous. Proximity sensors detect nearby objects and pedestrians to decrease the chances of collisions.

Since its 2007 debut, the vehicle looks unchanged, but development continues. The latest prototype versions, feature a small canopy to keep the user out of the weather. However, the 'roof' looks token at best and the open 'face' of the vehicle doesn't bode well for weather protection.

Despite the iREAL still presenting the profile of a playful puppy, Project Manager for i-REAL, Makoto Morita says Toyota is serious about 'productionising' the vehicle and says that if it were to be put into production today it would hit the market priced "between a motorcycle and a car". The main obstacle to offering the vehicle now, he says, is not range (Toyota claims 30km) or usability, but legislation. To this end, Toyota is in dialogue with Japanese road transport authorities and government to establish under what sort of regulations the i-REAL would be governed -- motorcycle or car.

The car/bike debate also applies to safety, says Morita-san. His team is studying motorcycle accident statistics to better understand the safety implications for i-REAL. He says users would not use a helmet but a seat belt might be fitted to the production version, along with a "capsule-style" safety structure. Morita-san also suggests the i-REAL could operate on bike paths or in Copenhagen-style separated road lanes.

The i-REAL is currently in limited trial use at Nagoya's airport. No prizes for guessing Nagoya is the hometown of Toyota. Security and police in some US airports use their own domestic equivalent of i-REAL, the Segway.

Toyota Australia product planning chief Peter Evans says the company has no plans to trial the vehicle Down Under and we're not surprised. The thought of Aussie road users accepting i-REAL is unreal. But Evans says that he could envisage applications that would be attractive to the company.

"I could imagine if the government and industry created a type of technology park, linked to technology universities, with residential areas and high-tech clean industries linked to academic counterparts... this [type of vehicle] having applications in these kind of mixed-modal areas," he told the Carsales Network.

"You could imagine it being publicly owned, rather than privately owned -- where you use it to go A to B and you leave it to B for the next user."

"The other places I'm thinking of are venues like Homebush [Sydney Olympic Park] where you might use them to move from venue to venue, office to office, in mixed mode, pedestrian-friendly atmosphere -- as opposed to driving cars or buses through a bunch of pedestrians," he stated.

The fact the lithium-ion battery powered i-REAL has got a 30km range is significant, says Evans. As silly as the vehicle looks and sounds, that fact and the apparent dynamic ability of the i-REAL do separate it from the myriad electric scooters already available and indeed, the less than commercially successful Segway.

For all that, we're not betting on i-REAL finding its way onto Australian roads or bike paths anytime soon... Unless, perhaps, we're inundated with Dr Who fans all of a sudden... Exterminate!!!

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