Thursday, 26 October 2017

The Flesby II Concept Is the Provocatively Named Undulating Airbag Car of Your Teletubby Nightmares

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October 26, 2017 at 12:28 pm by Andrew Wendler | Photography by Andrew Wendler and Steve Siler

You know that spacey, bemused, and slightly ethereal feeling you get when waking up with a cough-syrup hangover? The kind where dozens of tiny Technicolor tidbits of absurdity bounce around in your head while what’s left of your brain tries to put the universe back in order? That’s the same feeling we experienced when first saw the Flesby II at the 2017 Tokyo auto show.

The spawn of Toyoda Gosei, a multinational automotive supplier (interior and exterior plastics, LED assemblies, sensors, and airbags, among other products ), the Flesby II presumably picks up where the Flesby I left off, although the trail of information is hard to follow. Toyoda Gosei hasn’t revealed a whole lot about the new one, beyond this: Intended to protect pedestrians in the case of an impact, the Flesby II’s soft, flexible skin also provides the elasticity needed to raise and lower the ride height on command. The motion is accompanied by a slight “breathing” sound that has prompted onlookers either to ease their posture and offer a curious smile or to cover their ears and run as if they just found a soft, undulating latex product with a similar name in their mother’s dresser drawer. The movement is currently performed by mechanical means, but Toyoda Gosei said that it could be achieved by “e-rubber,” a skin activated by electrical current.

In person, the Flesby II resembles a giant replica of a toy car from an animated, children’s morning-TV show. Adding to the surrealism are the numerous LEDs that shine through the skin and move in attention-grabbing orchestrated patterns to warn pedestrians and just look freaky. The interior is a dreamy, softly lined cocoon that appears to be the ideal place to burrow in and watch the world pass by while the car moves autonomously. (We’d choose Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” as the soundtrack.) No mention is made of powertrain, but we assume EV technology is intended.

Toyoda Gosei is making no attempt to pass off the Flesby II as anything but a very high-level concept, a glimpse of what ultracompact vehicles might look like in approximately 2030. In that case, the future of transportation is both plenty weird and vaguely sexual.