Toyota is working on walking wheelchairs, a robo-car for kids and a truck for Africa

The clue is in the name. It’s the Tokyo Mobility Show going on right now in the Japanese capital, not the Tokyo Motor Show. Because these days carmakers don’t like to be pigeonholed as companies that only make cars. They want to be ‘mobility providers.’

Toyota has leaned into that hard. It’s revealed a wide and wild variety of ‘stuff that ain’t cars’ at the show this year. Here’s the best of it. 

The Kids Mobi is a car for children. No, really. The designers wondered if AI and self-driving meant in the future children could own a car because they wouldn’t need a license. Many legal questions yet to be answered there, we fancy, but the upshot is a sort of futuristic Little Tykes car with a friendly face, animated ‘eyes’ and autonomous driving capability. Cute!

Toyota has also made a big play that ‘if you’re not mobile, mobility should come to you’. Hence three new prototype vehicles for the non-able bodied. There’s a cross between a crab and an office chair that allows the paralysed, elderly or disabled to walk, run, even dance.

Then there’s a sort of Segway-meets-sports bike which can zoom around and lean into turns. It’ll help you play sports like tennis or basketball. Probably getting banned from the Paralympics quite soon, that.

Also intriguing is the ‘Land Cruiser of wheelchairs’. Apparently, this was a special request from Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda, who said he’s now 69 years old and wants to be able to drift, do donuts and race off-road into his retirement. So you get a pair of knobbly tyres and a rough-and-tumble frame.

And that’s not the only rugged vehicle Toyota reckons might be a future niche-buster. Arguably the most important machine at the entire show is something called the IMV Origin.

It’s a flatpack truck that ships 70 per cent assembled from the factory in a crate. Six fit in one shipping container and once on-site the recipient adds the cab, driving controls and so on. Toyota says this will create jobs wherever it goes. It’s up to the end user how they want their truck set up: it can be a trash wagon, a delivery truck, an ice cream van, a pick-up, a cattle-hauler, you name it.

It’s utilitarian, tough, simple and Toyota says it’s been designed for areas of Africa where the population doesn’t have access to paved roads and can’t afford existing vehicles. 

If it sounds familiar then you might remember the Gordon Murray Design OX truck, which was also a flatpack self-assembly off-road donkey designed to work in Africa. 

The project never went beyond the (much-praised) design concept stage, but now with the might of global giant Toyota behind it, the idea for an Ikea-spec DIY truck for some of the world’s poorest communities might have legs. Like the no-wheel chairs…