Toyota & Fine-S At 2010 Auto Expo

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Toyota is re-emphasizing its commitment to the Indian market with ‘Quality Revolution’ as its booth’s theme at the Auto Expo 2010 that is underway in New Delhi. ‘Quality Revolution’ reflects the company’s constant pursuit of perfection in order to create new levels of customer delight, and at the same time denotes Toyota’s focus on quality which is still the promising strategy for further growth in today’s environment. The Toyota booth expresses its theme through the 14 vehicles that are on display and categorized as eco-friendly, futuristic and current line-up zones – including the concept models of the compact car Etios.

The Toyota Fine-S is a hydrogen fuel cell hybrid-electric concept vehicle. It has absolutely zero emissions and emits only water from the exhaust.

The i-REAL is a ‘Personal Mobility Concept’ that is planned to be put on sale this year. It is a development of previous Toyota Personal Mobility vehicles including the i-unit and 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, to prevent it tipping over.

There are two joysticks, one for each hand. Either joystick controls the i-Real, so left- and right-handeed 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.