The Toyota i-Road is part-motorcycle, part- electric car and all giggles. Could it work in Singapore?



Fuji Speedway, Japan — When no one was watching, I tried to push the Toyota i-Road over. I couldn’t. That’s either down to my having muscles like a girl (likely) or Toyota’s engineering (more likely).

The i-Road may be a tall, skinny three-wheeler, but it has a low centre of gravity and weighs 300kg, so it’s not like a strong wind would blow one over.



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The Toyota Corolla is the best-selling car in history, but maybe the Toyota i-Road is more in line with what Singapore could use, especially in our quest to become a car-lite country.

It’s basically Toyota’s idea of what an Electric Vehicle should be like. Carmakers have been busy trying to build EVs to directly replace our fossil fuel ones, but Toyota reckons those are never really going to work because they take hours to charge.

Its long-term vision of zero emission cars is the Fuel Cell Vehicle, which runs on hydrogen and takes three minutes to refuel. But EVs still make sense… if they look like the i-Road.

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The thinking is simple, and makes perfect sense: since EVs tend to have a short range and are built with expensive hardware, just make one for short trips, and make it simple. That’s the i-Road in a nutshell.

Accordingly it’s not very fast (60km/h) and can’t go very far (50km on a single charge at best), and it won’t carry more than two people or offer the comfort of a car.

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