Toyota’s APM brings futuristic golf-cart looks to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
It'll be used to shuttle athletes, staff and anyone else who could use a ride.
In 30 years, we'll all be riding around the links of Del Boca Vista in these bad boys.
Toyota is determined to make the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo look like everybody's neo-utopian idea of Japan. It's already promised to bring some interesting vehicles and concepts to the festivities, with a wide variety of helpful purposes. Its latest creation to that end, the Accessible People Mover (APM) seeks to take a simple concept and hit it with some 21st-century changes.
Toyota on Thursday unveiled the APM, which was designed explicitly for use during the 2020 Summer Games. Under Toyota's idea of "Mobility for All," the automaker took the idea of a general-use golf cart shuttle and figured out how to change it in order to make it even more accessible. It's not just for athletes and staff, either; Toyota's fleet of roughly 200 APMs will also help shuttle around the elderly, pregnant and families with small children.
There will be two primary variants of the APM, both of which will run at low speeds on electric power. The basic model has a single seat up front for the driver, with seating for three in the second row and two more seats in the third row. There are safety bars to help with ingress and egress. If a person in a wheelchair wants a ride, the second-row seats can be folded up, and the APM carries built-in ramps and anchor plates.
The ramps and anchors are a great extra touch to ensure everybody can ride in the APM safely.
The second APM variant is what Toyota calls the "Relief" model. Instead of focusing on moving people around, this one specifically caters to the injured. Half of the second and third row are removed and replaced with a single stretcher, with two remaining seats for medical staff to ride along.
Toyota is determined to make Tokyo look wild in 2020. In 2017, we learned that the automaker will test out a new hybrid-electric boat during the Olympic Games. In 2018, Toyota announced that it would be running two separate mobility concepts -- the e-Palette and the Concept-i -- for various purposes. Earlier this year, we learned Toyota intends to deploy 16 of its Human Support Robots to help carry items and direct people to their seats.
