The i-REAL is a 'Personal Mobility Concept' made by automotive giant

Toyota is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturer headquartered in Toyota City, Aichi, Japan. It was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda and incorporated on August 28, 1937. Toyota is the List of manuf ...

that was planned to be put on sale sometime around 2010. It is a development of previous Toyota Personal Mobility vehicles including the

i-unit The instruction unit (I-unit or IU), also called, e.g., instruction fetch unit (IFU), instruction issue unit (IIU), instruction sequencing unit (ISU), in a central processing unit (CPU) is responsible for organizing program instructions to be fetch ...

and Toyota i-swing. As with said previous vehicles, the i-REAL is a 3-wheeled electrically powered one-passenger vehicle, running on lithium-ion batteries. In Low-Speed Mode, the vehicle is upright, and moves around at 'walking pace' at similar eyesight height to pedestrians, without taking up a large amount of space. In High-Speed Mode, the Toyota extends in length by leaning back and extending the single rear wheel to improve aerodynamics and stability, thus being able to achieve a speed of 18.6 mph, or 30 km/h. It leans into corners, like other tall, one-man vehicles such as the

Segway A Segway is a two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter device invented by Dean Kamen. The name is a registered trademark of Segway Inc. It was brought to market in 2001 as the Segway HT, and then subsequently as the Segway PT. ''HT ...

, to prevent it from tipping over. There are two joysticks, one for each hand. Either joystick controls the i-Real, so left- and right-handed people will be equally at home. You push the joystick forwards to go forwards, left to go left, right to go right and pull back to stop. Perimeter-monitoring sensors detect when a collision with a person or object is imminent and alerts the driver by emitting a noise and vibrating. At the same time, it alerts people around it of its movements through use of light and sound. The i-REAL was driven on the BBC's motoring programme

Top Gear Top Gear may refer to: * "Top gear", the highest gear available in a vehicle's manual transmission Television * ''Top Gear'' (1977 TV series), a British motoring magazine programme * ''Top Gear'' (2002 TV series), a relaunched version of the ori ...

in 2008 by

Richard Hammond Richard Mark Hammond (born 19 December 1969) is an English journalist, television presenter, and author. He co-hosted the BBC Two motoring programme ''Top Gear (2002 TV series), Top Gear'' from 2002 until 2015 with Jeremy Clarkson and James Ma ...

. (Series 12)

References

External links

{{Commons category, Toyota i-Real *https://web.archive.org/web/20090816182954/http://www2.toyota.co.jp/en/tech/p_mobility/i-real/ *http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/Drives/Search-Results/First-drives/Toyota-i-Real-concept/ *https://gizmodo.com/gadgets/drive-slow/toyota-i+real-concept-car-309614.php I-REAL Production electric cars Articles containing video clips