As well as add weight and width... and COST

If you are talking about the I-bot, you are the one who is WAY behind. It has been discontinued for 2+ years now due to uselessness. It was made to climb stairs, sure, but to use the stair-climb function, the user was required to have good balance which is one of the things lost to most spinal cord injuries, therefore making the chair useless to the group it needed to cater to the most. It also required more strength for the stair-climb function than most of the buyers had. Add to that the fact that it was so expensive (and not "medically necessary") that Medicare and Medicaid rarely paid for much (if any) of it, insurances wouldn't pay for it, state rehab agencies wouldn't pay for it, and there aren't a whole lot of people out there who are willing to pay that much for it out-of-pocket. The most recent stair-climbing chair is on tracks, but is still far too expensive for most people, and doesn't qualify for medicare/medicaid/insurance coverage either, as it is not something of "medical necessity" according to those groups. The real problem is crap "healthcare" and "insurance."

It works just like a baby's high chair. You flip it up to get in, then flip it back down after you're in

Tidbit and Mike, it detaches and stands independently, upright and the user gets into the chair first (somewhere that's NOT under the device) and then rolls up to the device and pushes it forward so the device locks onto the wheels. check the WHILL website and you can see pictures.

I'm a manual chair user, and I help people find rehab/daily-use med equipment (including wheelchairs, hand controls, standing frames, lifts, and all kinds of accessories) for a living. From the looks of the pictures and videos I've seen, there's not going to be a whole lot of call for these until either the manual chair makers make some serious changes to their designs, or we start making doors and aisles much wider. TiLite, Quickie, and Colours (the 3 top brands here in the US) all make manual chairs with certain dimensional limits (frame angle, camber, front and rear seat-to-ground height, CoG, caster arm mounting position, rear wheel type, rear wheel size as compared to ride height... just to start) that will make these difficult-at-best to fit to a chair. Plus, there are already electric-drive systems for manual chairs that work great, and take up MUCH less space than these. There are also issues of the poor posture and good lower torso/abdominal muscle function necessary to operate these. My spinal injury is very low (T-12/L-1 complete), but I don't have enough abdominal or lower back muscle control to use one of these very well. I can't imagine that people with higher level injuries would have any better time with this (at least from the ones I know) considering it appears to require the user to lean forward much of the time. I'm thinking these were designed by somebody who never had to use a wheelchair. Even the parts that attach to the wheels are pointless. They make the chair about a foot wider than it is already. My 16" frame chair (which is fairly small for a 30yr-old male) has an overall width of 26.5" thanks to some really narrow rear wheels and low-profile handrims, so if you add 12" to that, you get 38.5". That's wider than even most "wheelchair-accessible" doors in homes, and certainly wider than is preferable. A person with an 18" frame manual chair is likely sitting on about a 30" overall width already, so the addition of this device would make them over 40" wide! That's wider than most powerchairs... And wider than most doorways anywhere.

Don't forget that users have to figure out how to stow it and remove it from a car/truck/suv if they're not into driving vans (which many of us aren't). The sheer weight alone of 2 electric motors, the battery packs, and the housing all in one unit is going to make this thing difficult to load, especially considering it's rather odd shape and relative lack of gripping places. If the user drives a van, then there's the question of where to leave the drive unit (the vans don't have as much floor space as you might think), because the front bar won't exactly be helpful when trying to use automotive hand controls or a steering wheel...

And since good manual chairs are already over $4k-$5k, I'm thinking this is just going to make a manual chair nearly as expensive as a powerchair, and more ridiculous to operate. Throw in the fact that this thing is bound to either have to have special wheels fitted to the chair, or put too much pressure on the stock wheels, and this thing looks like another great idea that got totally destroyed by practicality. Bottom line, the description of "crazy" is about as accurate as it can be for this particular design.

If you knew how difficult a language Japanese is to translate and how it's not like Spanish where every office has like 14 people who speak it, you might understand the "oversight".

More than half of Japanese people in Japan speak at least enough English to be able to get the general idea across...