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On Dec. 17, the Toyota Mobility Foundation announced that the winner of its $1 million Mobility Unlimited Challenge was a smart manual wheelchair, the Phoenix i. The Phoenix was created by Andrew Slorance, a Scottish inventor and wheelchair uses who had previously designed both the futuristic Carbon Black Wheelchair and Phoenix Instinct, a practical luggage system for wheelchair users.

Slorance’s award-winning innovation is to add smart technologies onto an ultralightweight, carbon-fiber frame that blurs the lines between power and manual wheelchairs. It edged out four other finalists from across the globe — a Japanese team that developed a lean-to-move standing power wheelchair, an Italian team that designed a wheel-on shared mobility device that wheelchair users could use as an alternative to the dreaded scooter-rental programs, a U.S. team developing an advanced exoskeleton, and another U.S. team that developed a powered calf-sleeve for those who experience foot drop due to a stroke or other neurological conditions.

For obvious reasons, the team at NEW MOBILITY has been most excited about the Phoenix, but all of us were a bit skeptical that Slorance would actually win. That a wheelchair, even a ground-breaking one, could win a contest seeking to usher in the future of mobility seemed a stretch. After all, when people outside of the community think about technology to get disabled people moving, they think about walking.  History suggested smart money was on the exoskeleton. But the wheelchair — designed by a wheelchair user, no less — did win. And that says something about Toyota as a company and how the foundation designed the challenge, as well as Slorance’s prowess as an inventor.

The Challenge

The Challenge exists because of a business decision Toyota made to shift away from focusing primarily on the automotive marketplace to designing for mobility on a broader scale — think autonomous people movers for sports venues, robot helpers, self-driving cars, exoskeletons for factory workers, battery-operated scooters and hydrogen fuel cell buses. Many of the concepts have been designed from the ground up with universal design and accessibility features. Toyota’s R&D dollars seem to confirm the same long-overdue phenomenon also suggested by its commercials featuring adaptive athletes and tantalizing glimpses of stair-climbing wheelchairs — that major corporations are finally starting to view people with disabilities as customers rather than objects of charity. “We’re actually now becoming a market force,” says Rory Cooper, who runs the Human Engineering Research Laboratories at the University of Pittsburgh. “And that can only lead to more good things.”

The Toyota Mobility Foundation tapped Cooper and his colleagues at HERL to help design the Mobility Unlimited Challenge on one condition — they weren’t allowed to compete. Cooper has been at the forefront of mobility product research and design for decades and one goal of the Challenge was to nurture the next generation of designers.

The foundation and its partner, Nesta, which ran the Challenge, did their homework. They decided to focus on lower-limb paralysis rather than limb-loss or limb difference, both because of the huge numbers of people who are spinal cord injured (the WHO estimates up to 500,000 every year), but also because “the market for prosthetics was more developed and already benefiting from cutting-edge technologies, whereas the highly segmented market for mobility devices for people with paralysis was less innovative,” as TMF explained in a post outlining the Challenge.

There are a multitude of reasons for the lack of innovation in mobility products, ranging from healthcare insurances that will pay for only the most basic products, to government regulation, to economic realities of wheelchair manufacturers being owned by multi-national conglomerates and private equity firms. “The culture of your business changes when investors come in. It becomes a business about how much money can you make and how fast can you make it,” says Slorance. He says that the Toyota award allows his business to stay focused entirely on delivering a quality product. “Toyota doesn’t take any equity. They don’t retain any ownership of the [intellectual property].  They’re literally saying, ‘Here’s a million dollars, go and do this. Go and make a difference for wheelchairs and wheelchair users.”

The Winner

The Phoenix i, with its black matte carbon and graceful curves, certainly looks like the future. The look was both an aesthetic and a practical choice. For one, Slorance wanted to create something that he would feel good about rolling around in. Second, carbon fiber doesn’t like straight lines and 90-degree edges. By designing to the material’s strengths, Slorance has managed to create a frame that, at 5.5 pounds, is as light any anything else on the market while being strong enough to stand up to daily use.

Anticipating the skepticism many wheelchair users have about new and complicated technologies, Slorance has designed the Phoenix i as a modular system. If you just want a slick, ultralightweight frame, you can have that. If you like the idea of self-adjusting center of gravity, you can add that on. Same with the power assist and auto-braking system, which will run through the front casters. (See, “Andrew Slorance’s Phoenix I Smart Wheelchair Wins the $1 Million Toyota Mobility Challenge” for a more detailed breakdown of the chair.)

The frame has internal wiring and ports to connect these additions, and Slorance hopes that third-party designers will develop their own add-ons. A system that measures rolling efficiency and lets you know when your chair is in need of maintenance or another that lets you use an online mapping program to measure road conditions, slope and cross-slope to help fellow wheelchair users select the most accessible routes are all within the realm of current technologies.

The modular system is smart from a reimbursement standpoint as well. “This is not a [$15,000] dream for most people to never achieve,” says Slorance. “It’s going to follow an existing program — the chair will cost the same as your RGK [a British manufacturer of ultralightweight wheelchairs] and the add-ons will be cheaper than your SmartDrives, so we shouldn’t face too many challenges getting reimbursement.” That’s under Britain’s National Health Service though, and coverage under Medicare and many private U.S. insurances is likely to be a tougher sell. (For more on the state of wheelchair coverage in the U.S., see our upcoming March cover story.)

It is this kind of thinking that really sets the Phoenix i apart from the other finalists in the Mobility Unlimited Challenge. Slorance and team sought to design a product that is both practical and innovative. They understood how people with SCI/D use their chairs and the problems with existing technologies, and they know that wheelchair innovation doesn’t benefit anyone unless you can figure out how to pay for it.

It really shouldn’t be surprising that Slorance won. Wheelchair users have long known that most of the true innovations in mobility products have come from within the community. Kudos to Toyota for figuring that out too.

Watch the New Mobility Live interview with Andrew Slorance.