Honda U3-X news - Are you sitting comfortably? - 2009

It's a common problem: you're comfily propping up the bar on your favourite stool, several pints worse for wear. You realise you need to visit the, er, restroom. But - and here's the kicker - you've forgotten how to use your legs. Disaster!

Honda feels your pain, and has just unveiled the U3-X, a bar-stool-meets-unicycle personal mobility device that will allow you and your non-functioning legs to glide to the bathroom in all-electric ease.

A smaller, more compact take on personal transport than Toyota's iReal, the Segway or, heaven forbid, that terrible GM Puma contraption, the U3-X will scoot you around the office/high street/future at a whopping 4mph, changing course as you lean in the desired direction.

It's powered by a lithium ion battery that, says Honda, provides around an hour of eerily quiet transportation on a single charge.

Honda describes the U3-X as ‘a compact experimental device to provide free movement in all directions... just like human walking'. Which does beg the question: assuming you're able of limb, what exactly is wrong with walking? It's served us humans pretty well for a few thousand years, after all.

Honda has also released a short video of the U3-X in action. It doesn't look exactly... comfortable, does it?

What do you think, TopGeareans? The future of urban transportation? Or simply an uncomfortable and unstable take on, y'know... the chair?