Back in the good old days, you needed skills to ride a Suzuki up the stairs, and people would look at you like a lunatic. On the Suzuki MOQBA quadruped horsiecycle, though, no skills are required, and people are more likely to look at you with pity.
Four small electric wheels, each mounted to a robotic leg with three degrees of freedom, hanging from a double-boomerang frame. That's the chassis of the MOdular Quad Based Architecture (MOQBA) machine that Suzuki has just presented at the Japanese Mobility Show. On top of that chassis, you can run anything from a sit/stand motorcycle seat to a wheelchair, a stretcher, a garbage bin, a robotic arm or a carry basket.
The idea is to create a self-balancing next-gen transport device that can get to places motorcycles can't. Well, not with you or I on board. Throw the key of your Goldwing to Tony Bou and he could probably park it up a tree without putting a foot down.
It's more robotics than suspension, closer to Hyundai's insane Ultimate Utility Vehicles than to any quad bike. MOQBA appears to climb stairs one leg at a time, so it's going to be a long ride to the third floor. But the chassis will rotate around the seat, so you'll stay roughly level even when the wheels are three or four steps apart.
According to The Ecofinance – and lord knows how trustworthy a source that is – the MOQBA is capable of a 20-mph (32-km/h) top speed, and up to 50 miles (80 km) of range. A touch shy of your GSX-R, then.
Of course, if this "proposal for next-generation mobility" ever goes to production, it'll replace more mobility scooters and wheelchairs than motorcycles. And in that regard, you're looking at a device that could certainly open doors for elderly and disabled users, giving them easy access to subways, rough terrain and more or less any area built without wheelchair access in mind. One look at the dire shape of Japan's population pyramid should tell you why Suzuki is working on this kind of problem.
And with a stretcher on board, disaster recovery teams could potentially use this thing to get injured people out of rocky, rubbly terrain in a relatively stable and comfortable manner. Indeed, the chassis could be a decent platform for all sorts of autonomous or remote-controlled robots, too. Flip through the gallery to see more options for the modular top section
Source: Suzuki
