Making its debut at this month’s Japan Mobility Show, the Suzuki MOQBA is a little electric scooter with four wheels mounted on articulating legs. It’s the first motorcycle designed with the express purpose of walking up stairs. For now the design is in the conceptual stages, but this could revolutionize scootering in cities. Not only is there an added level of stability for climbing over obstacles, but you are much less likely to eat shit if you hit a pothole you didn’t see.
This Modular Quad Based Architecture is designed “for those who face barriers in transportation such as steps, even in a region with developed public transportation.” That probably means this is largely aimed at a Japanese audience, but I could see getting use out of this thing even here in a scooter-friendly step-heavy American city like San Francisco.
Suzuki is planning to show off a full spate of different chassis which can be carried by the modular leg platform. While the little e-scooter is the coolest of these for every-day use by an able-bodied person like myself, this system can be extremely useful as a stair-climbing wheelchair or medical stretcher as well. Suzuki also imagines the MOQBA can be used to carry heavy things up and down stairs, like groceries, packages, and garbage bins.
By combining the base chassis with attachments, body variation can be changed in three modes: Chair mode, Standing mode, and Stretcher mode. Through these modes, it contributes to the local society by not only providing the freedom of transportation, but also as a mobility that transports people and objects in places where cars can hardly go through in case of situations such as emergency.
If you’ve been looking for a quadrupedal motorbike, make sure you shout at Suzuki that you’ll gladly throw money at one of these machines if they bring them to production. It won’t actually get them to produce the damn thing, but maybe it’ll be cathartic for us to yell anyway.