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Custom fit lightweight wheelchairs are expensive. My Ti-Lite (one of the most popular lightweight chair brands) Aero Z starts at $3k and goes up quickly with wheels and backrest and casters and various other options that I need for sitting 16 hours a day without creating more problems. Insurance covers this for me every 5 years, but of course that's not a luxury every one has. Most plans don't cover DME 100%.

What Zack and Cambry are doing is great.

(edit) I’d like to add that I think part of being able to drive costs down is that they’re not offering these via insurance so they sidestep the need for FDA approval to market it as a medical device (hence the company name), CMS approval and HCPCS coding and all the regulatory costs that come with that.

Now don't get me started on power wheelchair cost...

I just want to add some context here because i feel like there is a large gap in understanding of what a wheelchair actually is. Please click through these and get an understanding of the level of detail required to be properly fitted for a wheelchair.

https://permobilwebcdn.azureedge.net/media/hylifiyf/creative... - note the clinical rationale and notes sections on each of these options.

https://permobilwebcdn.azureedge.net/media/4ozh2ary/tilite-s... - seating cushions and backrests

https://permobilwebcdn.azureedge.net/media/npxlfuoh/tr-tra-o... - current ti lite order form.

https://permobilwebcdn.azureedge.net/media/hjvhuqlw/tilite-p... - component list / prices. There are almost 11,000 individual parts that are available for purchase for years after the chair is sold so it can be supported through the expected life of 5 - 7 years usually.

And through all of this you are working with professional therapists that are trained to properly size all these measurements, because an ill fitting chair can cause more harm than good.

This is a bit like saying that an ill-fitting bicycle can cause more harm than good: technically true but missing the point. Sometimes it's valuable to have a cheap bicycle that you can expose to the elements without worrying about messing up the high-end components on your more expensive bike.

These seem to be mainly intended as secondary chairs or for part-time wheelchair users, rather than as primary chairs. My wife has three wheelchairs and I can see a case for buying one of these as her fourth.

Mind you, the situation with electric wheelchairs is very different. Many electric wheelchair users are at elevated risk of pressure sores, may not be able to get in and out or reposition themselves independently, etc. The profit margins on these chairs are still inexcusable, but the amount of custom fitting and memory foam everything is warranted because the user may well be in this chair, in that position all day every day. The cupholder and the umbrella mount are must-have accessories.

A manual wheelchair is less complex than a bicycle, and I can get a decent bicycle for a few hundred bucks. The fact that basic wheelchairs are crazy expensive has little to do with the chairs and a lot to do with insane bureaucracy.

You probably don’t want to sit on that cheap bicycle for 16 hours a day. Almost guaranteed it won’t fit property and at best will give you saddle, sores and worse cause back knee issues.

And also economy of scale, there are 1 billion bikes in the world VS 65 million wheelchairs.

Interesting, only 1 billion bicycles? I would have expected more than that. In most of the places I lived (Europe, Asia) there seems to be more than one beater bike per person lying around somewhere (and some nice bikes, too, but much fewer).

I'm actually surprised it's 1 billion, when you remove children, elderly, people simply out of shape for a bike, people unable to afford a bike no matter how cheap, people with disabilities incompatible with bikes, that billion is like 75%+ coverage of TAM.

Is that 1 billion adult bikes in particular? Because in the US, anywhere outside of big cities or college towns, children are ALMOST the only people who ride bikes regularly.

Lots of people have bikes who don’t use them regularly. It’s the kind of thing you have in your garage and bring out on a nice day sometimes.

Or at least you mean to, but perhaps never get around to it.

I poke fun at my neighbors for having decorative kayaks in their garage.

fair enough!

Some good points.

Many (most?) children have bikes, and lots of elderly people have some bikes somewhere in a shed back from when they used to be able to ride.

Almost everyone can afford a beater bike. That's why they are so common in the third world.

I'm not sure how out of shape you need to be not to be able to ride a bike? In any case, I wasn't wondering about how many people actively ride bikes. I was wondering how many bikes there are.

Don't forget Dutch people. I own and use four bicycles. My wife owns three.

If you look on ebay there are loads of wheelchairs for sale from about $100-$200 (£80-150 if british). They are mostly made in China and I think work ok - I bought one for £80 to use with my dad and it was fine. But that was for occasional use. I guess if you were to use it all the time you might want something fancier.

That raises a whole host of other issues. They're $200, because they don't have to pay their employees or provide a safe environment, the Government is subsidizing the manufacture or other unsavoury reasons. You can make things really cheap if you don't care about your staff.

The Chinese government subsidising the manufacture of wheelchairs doesn't sound as nefarious as you're making out. I would be proud if my government did the same thing.

Complete speculation, you’ve downed too much propaganda.

Manufacturing is cheaper in cheaper countries because of less taxes, inflation, bureaucracy, and a dozen other factors that aren’t negative socialist bullshit. Their workers get by just fine with the wages they’re paid.

Economies of scale and lack of competition.

When you have all the components for a cheap bike made in 100s of thousands by ie Shimano, the price goes down dramatically. Wheelchairs? Unless there is 1 dominant manufacturer its not going to happen to smaller shops, and monopoly has its own issues.

When you have regulatory tape which require some steep price hikes to cover some specific aspect (which may not be that important), combined with above you get what you get.

I was recently wheelchair-bound for a month due to my recent paragliding accident (crutches now for at least 1 month more, overall an interesting experience of various limits lying everywhere you don't even realize until you are there), and can appreciate even basic wheelchair and its various functionalities. Its simpler than bike for sure, but its also foldable (at least mine) and relatively easy to pack into trunk of any decent car in a minute (not for me of course but accompanying person).

Is there any hope for more affordable options becoming available in the future..?

You cannot get a custom designed bicycle for your body for a few hundred bucks, particularly from a US manufacturer

How many wheelchairs are actually truely customized? I hear a lot of complaints from wheelchair manufacturers that this isn't really customized

Part of the problem is the cost. Very few daily wheelchair users can afford to pay a 5-digit price for one.

Third party payment markets tend to have prices spin out of control. Usually the end user demand is fairly inelastic, and the third party is not driven by cost efficiencies in the negotiation. Getting into those markets as a new supplier is very hard as typically a select few incumbents have longstanding relations/deals with the third party.

I don’t think most bicycles are designed for 16 hours of daily use…

That being said, the significant price gap still seems disproportionate

How much does a quality ergonomic chair cost vs a pair of walking shoes?

In nations where bicycles are the norm, I would not be surprised if many of them get used 12+ per day.

NYC is awash in bicycle couriers, and they probably ride all the time.

Some of these comments are so bizarre that they could only be made by AI

Do people here really not grasp the difference between a disabled person being forced to use a wheelchair - which they can’t get out of casually and stretch about - vs a fit person willingly using a bicycle?

What is the malfunction?

> I don’t think most bicycles are designed for 16 hours of daily use…

Was stated. The answer directly to the statement was:

> In nations where bicycles are the norm, I would not be surprised if many of them get used 12+ per day. NYC is awash in bicycle couriers, and they probably ride all the time.

No AI needed.

Looks like it might be necessary for interpretation, though. That's not something I have any control over.

BTW: I am quite familiar with Serving disabled folks. That's pretty much my job, at home.

I’ve noticed that the most racist, ableist, you name it, individuals are the people who most claim to defend the group in question.

I guess this might be because strong opinions are best formed from a surface level understanding of a subject, while intricate and complex opinions require deeper understanding.

Yeah, but can you climb chairs with a bicycle? There are wheelchairs that can do that.

Presuming that you mean "stairs", these exist and impress Hacker News users who think any problem can be solved with enough overengineering, but nobody really uses them because they're so much worse at everything else. I've used one to board an airplane embarking from the tarmac, that's about all they're good for.

Well, bicycles have more demand and volume (presumably), so that would play in to it. But yes, bicycles are a good point of reference.

Why? The comfort level and ergonomics demands are completely different. Bicycles are for a few hours of weekly use. Wheelchairs are for 16 hours of daily use.

Bicycles built for long duration use - people do ride for 16-24 hours straight more than you'd think do exist.

How many of them do that every day?

And of those people that do, how much do you think they spend on their bikes?

And, when people do use cheap bikes that don't really fit them out of necessity long-term, what's the toll on their body? It's probably not zero!

The parent comment is so bizarre

No one who uses a wheelchair does it because they like doing it

Everyone who rides a bike for 16 hours a day does it because they like doing it, and/or they’re an athlete

When you’re done riding your bike for 16 hours a day - likely one week in a year - you can go to the gym, stretch out

The wheelchair guy has to drag himself everywhere

Sure, but those bicycles don’t cost 100 bucks they probably cost 5000+. The last bicycle I bought was $7000 and that was midmarket (my recreational cyclist standards).

I was recently in Rwanda where seemingly half the goods of this very hilly country are transported by bicycle, and those are single speed old english style bikes with steel frame reinforced with rebar. (they carry hundred of kgs on the racks). The bike are run 8 hours a day for years and cost $100.

The recreational market does spend a lot of money on bikes. Much of it is of questionable gain already, and in the context of Rwanda negative since the recreational bike generally compromises comfort for speed - a fine compromise for recreation but bad one for most Rwanda uses.

However some of what they are spending money on would make those bikes in Rwanda much better. Better/more comfortable seats can greatly ease the toll on your body. Disk brakes would stop the load much better and so make them safer. A couple gears would be nice (assuming it doesn't compromise drive train strength too much). Modern cargo bikes likely have a better cargo position as well.

This is the definitely the standard we should strive for when considering the needs of our wheelchair bound friend and family. If they want anything more than a 130lb wheelchair made out of old rebar they're just being selfish really.

In India millions of women are walking miles to fetch few gallons of water everyday. I don't get why people in California are screaming water shortage. Should be possible for Americans to live on a gallon of water if hundred of millions live like that in India.

It’s very hard to change your standard of living, and the standard of living in California is very different. We live off of tens of gallons of water a day or more. When you have to cut back, it’s difficult for your human animal to accept it. Population wide, it’s nearly impossible.

Yeah. This is why I’m so pessimistic about long-term prospects for the human race.

Living minimally is a skill that society has essentially turned into a negative trait. Our planet can only support so much, and individual humans are very selfish. There are 8 Billion now.

Possible? Sure, and a lot oft of hippie/environmentalist types in America do live that way, both in cities and in rural areas.

Is it desirable? Not necessarily. The goal is to be more efficient with water sourcing, distribution, and usage so people have more water to use, not less.

I don't think many people do that, and if so, how many of them do it on one that cost "couple of hundreds"?

I was curious so looked at a few power wheelchairs...It's wild how expensive they are, especially considering the advancements in electric mobility tech elsewhere. You'd think they'd share some components with e-scooters, e-bikes, or even electric cars – motors, batteries, controllers.

Are the powertrains and control systems in power wheelchairs really that specialised? Or is it another case of the medical device markup and regulatory hurdles driving up costs?

I'm a guy who has disassembled and reverse engineered a standard Jazzy power chair, and what I noticed was the attention to detail regarding failures. The chair is thoroughly designed to shut down at the slightest bit of trouble. There's some redundancy in things like the controller, where it used redundant hall effect sensors that were identical to the others, but ran in an inverted power profile, to detect any weirdness in the sensor outputs.

I ended up adding a long range remote control to it. A remote control power chair is fun to drive around. People do get a little concerned when they see a chair rolling around without a driver

My mum recently had a curbside crash while she was riding an e-bike. This resulted in her breaking bones in both her hands, which resulted in a surgery in her left hand and various problems (tcl fracture related) with her right hand.

This makes me actually appreciate reliability in e-vehicles motor cutoffs etc. I keep thinking if this could have been avoided with a better quality e-bike or if actually it would be even worst with a cheaper one.

Which makes one think, how often a wheelchair with cheap e-scooter parts would crash people into staris, cars etc

I know public use devices have their own problems with reliability, but I did almost cause a traffic accident a couple times over the years. Every time, the scooter's accelerator lever got "sticky" due to repetitive (mis)use, and would sometimes not go all the way to 0 when released. Stuck at ~10%, the scooter would brake normally and remain at halt under my weight, but the moment I stepped off it, it would suddenly launch itself at the cross traffic.

It's these little things that get you. The scooters all have some kind of debounce logic, disabling the accelerator until you're moving sufficiently fast - but the logic doesn't kick in when you stop without releasing the lever. A little bit of redundancy would've helped here.

A friend has an e-unicycle (I think the category devices has some other name as well..) and he wanted to try out how it behaves in a track.

He sort of knew, but didn't expect it, that when the roll of the device exceeds a certain threshold, the device will shutdown. Even if you're on a curve going with some speed. Broke his wrist. Since then he's also wearing wrist protectors that keep the hand straight.

Actually it was a bit unexpected that it would have known to do that; it must have used its complete IMU data to even know it was rolled, as plain accelerometer would have been pointing "down" as usual.

I'm an embedded software engineer with past experience developing robotics and motor control drivers.

Those e-unicycles terrify me. No way I'd trust my life to one. Once you're at speed, every failure mode results in instant passenger ejection. I see people flying through traffic on those things - they're just one sensor glitch or integer overflow away from serious injury.

> Actually it was a bit unexpected that it would have known to do that; it must have used its complete IMU data to even know it was rolled, as plain accelerometer would have been pointing "down" as usual.

That actually feels like overengineering based on well-intentioned, but wrong specs. You probably want to just use sideways acceleration for "falling over" detection, instead of roll.

The safety with ebikes does vary a bit although I'm not sure it's down to price. My one is quite a cheap one but has quite a lot of safety features - will only go if you pedal it, motor cut if you touch the breaks, 14 mph speed limiter etc. But I guess you can come off any two wheeled vehicle.

> People do get a little concerned when they see a chair rolling around without a driver

Add a hat and a scarf on a wire and you've got a Halloween prop.

Assistive technology costs are high because consumers barely have an alternative. I am blind. In Europe, a 40-cell braille display starts a 6k. 6k, just for a monitor which displays 40 characters. Prices are largely unchanged since 20 years. Technological advancements are irrelevant. Resellers will squeeze the cow, thats plain capitalism man.

If that is the case, then there seems to be a place in the market for someone else who can sell these devices for cheaper.

However, as you have pointed out, since it is also a market where people have few choices, there is no incentive for any new player to significantly lower the prices. Even if they easily could. Because they know that they will get the customers anyway.

That seems to be the root cause of the excessive price problem. An existing oligopoly of rent-seeking companies. Or a cartel, if you like.

I think that one of the ways to disturb this market and bring the prices down is for some honest company to join it and price their products fairly.

Once there is one such company, I assume that everyone else will lower their prices as well. Because otherwise they will run out of business.

The problem is if you spend 100 million dollars to make one (which is about 30 engineers, 50 testers, and 20 other for a year) and sell 10,000 units (remember there is competition who will get come sales) you need $1000 each just to pay engineering costs. Lack of scale is what makes many products expensive.

If you don't mind educating a curious person — why are Braille displays still worth making when text-to-speech is free, everywhere, and communicates information much more quickly than Braille? I can understand that there might be special situations where you really need a device to be silent, but it's hard for me to see how the cost-benefit tradeoff would weigh in favour of a Braille display except in the rarest of circumstances.

Just from googling -- an orbit reader 40-cell appears to cost $1,700 USD, is there a reason this doesn't actually solve the same problem as the 6,000 euro display, or are these not available in your market for that cost? Sorry if my question is off the mark, I don't know a lot about this and your comment piqued my curiosity.

Orbit reader is the most low-quality device you can find on the market. This is like suggesting a bicycle to someone complaining about car prices.

I’m sure the commenter meant well. You said “In Europe, a 40-cell braille display starts a 6k.” Which to me means that the most low quality, cheapest device starts at 6k.

Now i learn from you that that low quality device is so bad that you consider it a separate product class in itself. Can you tell us more what does it lack? In other words what features are you looking for when you are looking for a 40-cell brail display? (What is the minimum quality for it to be a “car” in your analogy?)

This is a fascinating potential wedge for an open-source initiative. Could you please elaborate as to what makes a device highly usable and of good quality, vs cheap and unpleasant to use?

I’ve long thought that open source would make a lot of sense for assistive devices, and that it has the potential to change incentives within the cartel of assistive device manufacturing.

There was a HackadayPrize 2023 competitor that worked on this [0]. He had to rethink the way those devices are built to bring the cost down.

That would be interesting to know if his solution could match the 4k$ in term of usability or if there is some issue like refreshing rate that make the piezo based system necessary for a good user experience.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXi1tG78AW4

That looks like a great project. I share your curiousity regarding the user experience of this vs the piezo units. Looking at it, it should be in the 50-100mS range for refresh times, maybe that is too slow? It seems like it would be plenty fast? I wonder if there are other haptic factors with the piezo, like vibration?

This is specifically like someone that has never seen or used a car or bicycle asking about why a bicycle wouldn't work for someone complaining about car prices, which I think is a pretty reasonable question!

I suspect a major difference is that those e-scooters, bikes, cars, etc are produced and sold by the millions, whereas wheelchairs are small volume by comparison. Another commenter mentioned the legal requirements, which complicates things.

That said, a quick google says there's 65-132 million wheelchair users worldwide so it's not a small market either.

Most of them are probably in countries where 1000 is a years wages.

...but the production and distribution of wheelchairs

I think a significant portion of the cost is related to the "medical device" label.

It's impressive and a little sad how cheap you can get them second hand.

I'm a big fan of his channel, but when I saw the price tag, it got me thinking for a moment. Wheelchairs are a great example of why niche products are expensive.

I think you're spot on with certifications.

I was stupid a few times and needed orthopedic equipment. Each time, the price flabbergasted me. But it didn't matter since the health insurance fully refunded it.

In a regulated market, if you can influence the cap, the item will cost exactly that, no less. And if the market is small enough to not allow any disruption, then it will stay that way forever.

I need to talk to my girlfriend who's a physiotherapist about it. But for now I'm hoping his YouTube fame would start a snowball effect.

Thinking he could do with the wheelchairs what Elon is pretending to do with EVs is truly exciting.

It’s not that small of a market if you consider how many wheelchairs the European public sector buys. Take your average Danish hospital and they’ll have at least 10 wheelchairs placed at every major entrance. They’re basically like shopping carts in a lot of public healthcare places. These are semi-regularity replaced because of wear and tear. If you could supply them with a cheap, solid be easily repairable version you could disrupt that market.

Of course you’re not going to have a very easy time entering the market. But even though they buy these things on regulated supply deals, they’re not cheap. If you could get a certified electric one on top of a (I’m not sure if it’s called regular), then you would be posed for disrupting the market.

$1000 is not cheap for an off the shelf wheelchair such as hospitals make available for patients (in the UK, at least). That was my first thought on reading the article - "$1000 for a wheelchair, really?" - and a quick Google shows that you can buy what looks like reasonable quality wheelchairs for less than that. But the ones on the article are custom-made for each buyer, which is clearly a vastly more expensive option.

But, to the point, hospitals don't buy custom wheelchairs.

No, you can't buy a reasonable quality wheelchair for less. You can buy what a person who doesn't need a wheelchair consider reasonable. If you had to use those cheap chairs for 16 hours a day, and pushing yourself even just for a mile of well paved roads, not even uphill, you would never consider those reasonable.

This is absolutely the point. You have to live sitting in there. That must be more comfortable than the best thing in your house. No way you can do it for less than 1k.

Not just sitting, pushing yourself. Making a comfy chair is one thing, making one that you can also be mobile in, much harder.

Except the wheelchairs used in hospitals are to push patients short distances across hard flat floors.

The OP isn't about hospital wheelchairs, but daily use wheelchairs. It's just most of the commenters here showing ignorance or ableism by suggesting the two are equivalent.

I'm not saying otherwise - my comment reaffirms this. There are two separate things going on here -

- You can buy a reasonable wheelchair for moving people relatively short distances across flat surfaces for less than $1000. E.g those used in hospitals and for the partially mobile.

- You cannot currently buy a reasonable self propelled wheelchair for full time use for less than $1000 (give or take the manufacturer in the article).

What about serviceability and spare/replacement parts?

I guy selling mobility scooters told me that most customers never service theirs as it is easier to get the health insurance to pay for a new one every x years. This results in a very limited second hand market.

It doesn't work like this.

Take aircrafts or (to some degree) a racing car. You need a screw. Sure you can get one at your local hardware shop for a penny, but for regulated market you need one with certification and that will cost you something close to $10. I know it's crazy but that's how it works.

Difference being it doesn't fail and if it does you know exactly how it was made and under which process. There will be an investigation to see what went wrong - was it the screws fault or was more force placed on it than it was certified for.

Vs the one from the hardware store could have come from Alibaba and be a plastic core with a thin coating of metal for all you know.

I think it works in this case because Zack has a high profile YouTube channel and a high degree of trust in his workmanship from that. As they say, regulations are written in blood, and I would trust an approved device over a chair from some no name company somewhere because I have more faith that it won’t break on me while I’m out and about. Zack is obviously an exception to that because of his reputation which I think will help him be successful in this endeavor.

Ya, I was expecting to see something not very impressive at that link, but was pleasantly surprised. My chair is about $7k and while this one doesn't look like it would work for me, it is definitely much better than the cheap hospital chairs.

If you don’t mind sharing, what aspects of it make it seem like it wouldn’t work for you?

Are the hospital chairs cheap? Genuinely asking...

Amazon appears to offer such chairs for like $200? They're probably crap though.

They're crap. And that's what you find at hospitals and airports.

What do you recommend for my parent, they are using a crappy Medicare approved Medline wheelchair that’s like $300 on Amazon. They can’t use their right side of their body really due to a stroke paralysis.

The wheelchair is like starting to fall apart. What should I I get them that will last many years? Thanks!

You should really have an ATP evaluate them to determine what they need. Hemiparesis and a bad fitting chair is no joke. Unfortunately this is likely to be expensive (as noted in this entire post). You can try getting a lightweight chair like a TiLite or Quickie online, but the fitting and sizing is the most important part and in my experience a trained professional is the best route your first time around. After that, as you become more familiar with the needs of your parent you can make adjustments in the future.

So about the price of a Herman miller chair. Honestly sounds pretty reasonable to me. Though ideally it was less so price doesn’t limit access

Anything medical becomes a licensing nightmare. With how expensive power wheelchairs get I’m shocked they don’t come with a flight box.

Hey, would you get started on power wheelchair costs? Inquiring minds would like to learn more.

Device so essential to daily life is treated in such a costly, bureaucratic manner

For context - he has a ~9m sub youtube channel on phones that must be banking it. This is a side project that appears to be grown out of frustration of disabled wife & seeing the shitshow that wheelchair market is. Seems 10/10 wholesome to have this disrupted by someone that cares

> This is a side project that appears to be grown out of frustration of disabled wife & seeing the shitshow that wheelchair market is

While it is absolutely true that he cares, I think you are selling his long term plans short. The primary growth factor for the channel was reviewing phones with the repairability / endurance focus, but somewhat recently he expanded to topics such as plugging abandoned oil wells which are leaking methane and wheelchair mobility issues. From what I understand he has a couple similar things in the pipeline.

Didn't he also help get some libraries built in Kenya?

I think so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R71uDa3DNw

Let's not forget that he also shoots stuff like the cybertruck for fun, which is awesome.

i think he's a better than average presenter for a youtube channel. I did like his huge bunker videos

my biggest annoyance is his plugging or advertising stuff too obviously

Obvious advertising is the most ethical kind.

Thank you for pointing this out so clearly, I'd not thought about it this way before but this makes perfect sense in a "best of the worst" kind of way.

I'll take his transparent advertising over "native" ads any day.

Agreed. I understand he has to pay the bills but there were one or two episodes of the bunker series that really felt like fluff to put in between ads.

Would rather have 5 episodes with a 5 min sponsor section than one 25 min episode about your way too expensive cooling mattress

Man has to pay bills

More like tithe it all to the LDS.

I wouldn’t expect more than 10%

I mean, without the advertising, he wouldn’t be able to make any videos. Quite honestly tired of people pulling out this argument like all content creators need to be altruistic trust fund kids.

> abandoned oil wells which are leaking methane

What? That still happens with so much CO2 and climate change outrage and people literally gluing themselves to roads as protest?

Ok, did more research: "In 2021, fugitive U.S. methane emissions from abandoned wells were 295 kilotons—equivalent to 8.2million metric tons (MMT) of CO2 with a 95% confidence interval of 1.4 to 25.1 MMT, the largest uncertainty range among the nation’s largest sources of methane (US EPA 2023)." https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/orphaned-wells-metha...

Which is like 0.1% of us co2 emissions

I actually looked it up, per EPA in 2022 6343mmt of CO2 were released in U.S - https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...

So the estimate would range from 0.12% to 0.4% (for 8mmt and 25mmt respectively).

I’ve been watching his channel for a long time and remember back before they were together.

If I remember correctly he first built her a wheelchair to go hiking in. That was kinda the beginning of their relationship. I think there was also a stair climbing wheelchair involved at some point, but that could have been a sponsored thing rather than something he built.

He’s also been working on an electric humvee. So he’s a lot more than just the channel where he scratches and tears apart phones.

It's explained not very far in the article what the first wheelchair he built her was.

My former girlfriend gets powered wheelchairs through the Ontario Disability Support Program, and I witnessed and learned that the whole thing is such a fraud.

Her powered chair was just over $20,000 and was a terrible piece of machinery. You were definitely not getting the "medical devices have to be reliable" premium. And any time the technician came out, we got a bill to forward to ODSP for thousands of dollars, even for the simplest fix.

And of course there was zero competition: there was one and exactly one vendor you could go to for this stuff. They were, of course, terrible with customer service, terrible with technician competence, and their products were consistently terrible.

I'm usually instantly skeptical of any tech startup that wants to airdrop into a problem space and disrupt things, but in this case, I'm 38,000% confident that there's something that can be done with this one.

You had to have cashflow to pay those bills and wait for a redund? Sounds terrifying.

I have an Ontarian optometrist in the immediate family. I helped them set up a very tangled and innefficient ODSP claims process. It's a terribly, terribly managed program. I'm not sure if the OP has to pay and be reimbursed, but I wouldn't be surprised. That family member has to wait upwards of a year sometimes to be reimbursed, occaisionnaly they wait that much time only to be refused because of a "problem" which is not detailed anyways, so the business has to waste time to figure out problems. All the while, they are in the hole for that money.

No, ODSP covered it. The vendor would basically have an outstanding balance on the account until ODSP sent them the money. Still had to send the paperwork in to get that all going.

Sounds like someone should make them available to lease

>And of course there was zero competition: there was one and exactly one vendor you could go to for this stuff. They were, of course, terrible with customer service, terrible with technician competence, and their products were consistently terrible.

It's probably not a cost effective market to be in and getting a government monopoly is the only way to make it viable in the first place.

The BOM for this wheel chair is probably 200-300 of just wheels and bearings maybe more. People who say this can be bought for 200$ are completely out of touch. You can’t even buy a decent bike for much under a grad new and bikes have much better scale.

https://bikesdirect.com/

Lots of good bikes in the $300-500 range. I've had one for more than 12 years and thousands of miles without issue or drama.

I paid $300 for a single speed road bike from BD in 2012, it looks fancier than it is with a carbon fiber fork. Added some Gatorskin tires and it's worked ever since, I only clean and lube the chain every 5 years so far. Made in Canadia.

On the bike comparison, we should keep in mind that a sub-par bike isn't much of an issue for the general public, as requiring more energy is fine (even sometimes seen as an advantage) for able bodies, and the bike breaking during a trip will usually mean just walking from there. Bikes' defaults will seldom be critical short of an accident happening.

You don't have that luxury with a wheelchair, you'll want decent efficiency and better reliability, which means better parts and better construction overall. That's where top end bikes are a more reasonable comparison IMHO.

This is a good point. Also most people don’t really ride their crappy bikes or do so knowing that it has weird problems like gears not shifting correctly in part of the range or random shifting.

Most companies have a basic of the basic bikes in the 400-500 range but these are built with cheap parts that won’t last more than a season. A step up from that would be a 700-100$ bike that’s more likely to last. For daily wheelchair use don’t expect the 500$ level parts to be good enough.

You're replying to someone who just stated they have such a bike and it has already lasted 12 years.

They have a single speed bike, which is a lot cheaper and not what most people mean when they want to buy "a bike". Adding gears will add at least 100€ to the price, for entry level components.

They also said they replaced the tires with gatorskins, which are 40€ a piece.

I would assume the wheelchairs that prompted this are single speed also though, making it an apt comparison?

So that's $400 instead of $300 then? Not sure if he means CAD or USD.

Good wheels costs 500-1000 $/E for aluminium, carbon costs more, but for most people is really not neccesary. Premium tires like GP5k cost close to a 150 a pair.

Not saying that the wheelchair is provided with these because I haven't checked the spec, but saying you can have a bike for $300 is like saying you can buy shoes for $10.

To second this: I've owned three "Motobecanes" [Bikes Direct] and one of them is still going strong, since 2014.

The purchases from 2009 was stolen, and the 2011 bike didn't survive a gnarly crash — to no fault of BikesDirect.com

Please clean the chain more!

The feel of riding it after makes it worth it, and a decent degreaser makes the job trivial.

I wait until it's noisy >..<

Agree, after a fresh cleaning it's silky smooth!

[dead]

My bike cost £75

This isn't a bike though... It's a nearly custom fit medical device they'll use most of their waking hours where bad fits can cause permanent damage to their bodies. Their configurator has ~25k options just for the frame fit ignoring colors and all the other parts of the wheelchair.

Would you be willing to spend all day every day on it?

Would you be willing to pin your entire ability to leave home on it?

My bike cost £30 (because I got it from a bike charity that sells excess donated bikes to the public to raise funds)

As of today, the cheapest adult bike-shaped-object in Halfords is £116. It's another £35 if you want them to assemble it, although Halfords are infamous for having pictures of incorrectly assembled bikes in their own catalogue

A decent bike for a child costs more than that these days in North America.

You either bought this bike used, stolen, in 1989 or are trolling.

Even a cheap Walmart kids bike costs more than that now. (Even the toddler bikes are reaching up there in price.)

You say used like it's a slur. There are many fairly high quality bikes to be had used for a reasonable price in most areas of the us. With a few tools and a can-do attitude, you can make almost any bike fit for use. My current daily bike cost about $50. I replaced maybe $100 of bearings and other wear parts. Going on year 4 of medium use now; still works great.

Obviously not everyone wants a new hobby of fixing bikes. But its a great time for almost any hacker or maker.

A good Kids bike is easily 300-400. If you want one that weighs less than your kid that’s what you have to pay.

And it makes a world of difference for a small kid as I've experienced recently, totally worth it if you can afford a lightweight bike (eg 5kg 16" vs standard 8-9kg).

Absolutely, some of these bikes are the adult equivalent of 150lb bikes for kids. No wonder the kids hate them. Even a light weight bike is like a 70lb bike.

They do?

I don't remember hating my bike when I was a kid, and I had the cheap kind. I also don't remember it being too heavy or anything. Of course if I wanted to ride my bike, I had to lift the heavy wooden garage door up (elementary-school-age). Kids that I volunteer with all seem weak and have issues that I never had.

There's a parable about helping a butterfly out of a cocoon:

https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2007/12/10/the-lesson-of-the-but...

I bought it used. Why does that discount my statement?

This thread is bonkers. I'm not even American and it took me all of two minutes to find a bike for $118 USD (or about 90 GBP) available from Walmart. Here it is: https://www.walmart.com/ip/1121295

It looks like a perfectly serviceable bike, if not the most amazing experience. I bet you with proper maintenance it could last you decades and thousands of miles.

People in this thread who are claiming a new bike is nearly $1000 are on another planet.

I get that this isn't a wheelchair, doesn't have anything to do with wheelchair prices, and I would certainly not want to rely on this thing in the way a wheelchair user must rely on their chair, but c'mon, guys, stop with the wild hyperbole about bike prices.

> find a bike for $118 USD

You didn't find a bike. You found a box of parts. Read the page again:

> Mountain Bike Assembly - $99.00

If you want the box of parts assembled into a bike, it effectively doubles the price. Also there's no promise it's assembled correctly, or that the bike parts are actually good. "Proper maintenance" is a handwave for spending multiple times the cost of the bike to cover up the inadequacies of the bike.

https://www.whycycle.co.uk/buying-a-bike/beware-the-bicycle-...

> We generally recommend spending a MINIMUM of about £200 on most styles of adult bike [...] there are some reasonable quality bikes at below £200 but if you intend to buy at this price, do so from a reputable bike specialist.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/mechanics-ask-walmart-major-...

https://old.reddit.com/r/MTB/comments/z2d5h5/walmart_bike_un...

So for $118 you get a really poor quality bike that you probably can't repair. Or perhaps you'll end up with one that's just unsafe. $400–500 is probably a reasonable price point, but that'll get you something that's adequate at best. Heavy, clunky, and unpleasant to ride.

That ‘Heavy, clunky’ bit is key.

A good bike is addictive to ride. It’s like a sharp knife through butter.

Yes, the $118 bike is not going to be much fun, and may be assembled dangerously. It's still a bike, though, and a little TLC and attention to assembly before riding will prevent a significant number of problems. Even the reddit thread you linked just required some screw tightening and replacement of a derailleur -- and a cheap Shimano derailleur is $20 from my local bike store.

Even if we completely discount the $118 bike (plus a $20 part), though...

> $400–500 is probably a reasonable price point

This is a far cry from "much under a grand". Yes, it will be heavy and clunky, but it will function in all of the ways that it is important for a bike to function.

  Yes, the $118 bike is not going to be much fun, and may be assembled
  dangerously.

  Yes, it will be heavy and clunky, but it will function in all of the ways
  that it is important for a bike to function.

I got a cheap "bike" as a student and regretted it when a crank arm snapped clean off pulling away from the lights. No serious damage done to me, but the potential was there.

I used to buy cheapest I can get away of everything and I have to tell you, there is real difference between cheapest bikes you reference, bikes that cost few hundred $ and $1000 bike.

The difference is in speed, effectivity (how tired you get per km), comfort, how much it hurts when terrain is bad and pretty much any other factor you can think off. Those cheap bikes are fine if you go to work and back, 15min drive each way. Or for kids to play around town.

But if you bike a lot, then you really want better bike.

>This thread is bonkers

>People in this thread who are claiming a new bike is nearly $1000 are on another planet.

HN is absolutely chock full of people who have entirely lost touch with reality.

Anyways, my sister rode a $200 bike to work every day for like six years. Doing the math, about 19,000 miles. I grew up with a cheap Walmart bike and I had it for over a decade and probably at least 5,000 miles I would guess.

so out of touch you're using an example of a bike purchase from 6 years ago :^) did she also replace the tires 3 or 4 times? because no way any bike tire is taking 19,000 miles of road use no matter the brand. The average price of a new bike more than doubled from 2015 to 2024.

I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, ten dollars?

This thread is now full of people who, with real lived experience, will tell you that $200 bike served them perfectly well, but downvotes rain in from people who spend five times more than a middle-Americans month’s worth of savings on a bike and won’t hear of anything less.

It’s not often that the class divide on HN is so front and centre, but it is here.

200$ in what year? 1990? Go price out parts even the lowest their at a bike store and see what it would take to get a complete bike. Sure it might be cheaper in bulk but you will be within 30%.

Also everyone assumes assembly labor is free.

>It’s not often that the class divide on HN is so front and centre, but it is here.

It's an entire forum of people who have never experienced scarcity so they can't understand it.

Unlike a bike, where able-bodied individuals can take the trade off buying it for cheap and risking it breaking a weld and having to gasp walk.

People that are handicapped kind of need their wheelchair not to break unexpectedly.

I don't see anything being out of touch here. You can absolutely get a $100-$200 bike, and it's completely fine if your use is casual. You start going up in bike prices when you start talking about more and more serious use of bikes which is what probably users here think of. Road bikes are hyper focused on cutting every gram with the most efficient cranksets, MTBs are focused on shear abuse and you absolutely will destroy a $100 bike in a month if you actually ride seriously.

You just linked to a $118 box of parts (or $217 if you want it assembled). This is an absolutely trash bike.

You can get a nice bike that, while not fancy and might weigh more than it needs to, will last years and be safe provided it's maintained, for about £200-£300 ($260-$400 USD) in todays prices. If you bought a bike for $200 years ago, then this is the price bracket you were buying into, not the cheap shit. You can then get increasingly good bikes as you go to $1000 and beyond.

You seem to be be blithely unaware how shit the cheapest bikes are these days. I've had bikes where the crankset literally sheared off, where the frame's welds have cracked rather than the suspension failing, where the brake cables have snapped, where the chain has snapped, where bolts have rusted, where the plastic twist-shifters can't hold a gear and drop them as you go over cobblestones, where things have broken because the minimum wage supermarket employee who knows nothing about bikes has assembled it wrong. This will be the average person's experience with the cheapest-of-the-cheap bikes, and the only way they'd be happy with it is if they don't really use the bike much, or they keep it indoors and don't cycle in the rain, or there are no hills where they live, and so on.

It only costs a little more for a hard-wearing, all-weather bike. Not thousands more. If the most you can afford are these shitheaps, I feel sorry for you, and I recommend you look for a bike charity in your area that will sell you or give you a decent second-hand/donated bike that has been checked over by a decent bike mechanic.

was it new?

This looks like a very cool project and I'm happy to see it.

But please, to the author: give us some real price comparisons! I don't know how much a wheelchair costs. After reading this article, I still don't. Just be crystal clear and say "a simple manual wheelchair, approved by insurance, is often $4k, with $1k paid out of pocket" or whatever.

You're in the right ballpark, though a good chair can easily get you into the 5 figures. Top-end is perhaps $20k.

From their front page : "For more than three decades, New Mobility has published groundbreaking content for active wheelchair users."

Fair from them to assume the (average) reader is familiar with the subject.

We live in IL, US. I just received wheelchair for my 3 year old son. We waited for this 9 months. This wheelchair has not any electronics or complex parts and, according to EOBs, costed our private insurance exactly: $18,212 (yes that is 18K! I just added this up and verified) after all deductions and discounts! After that, we received follow up call from the company that delivered the chair. We expressed our not satisfaction because we seen other wheelchairs that looked much more portable and sleek comparing to ours. I think the problem was that we were not provided with options at all. After which, they stopped communicating with us.

In the UK you can buy a simple wheelchair for 132 GBP: https://www.uk-wheelchairs.co.uk/ugo-essential-self-propelle...

And what look like slightly fancier ones for between 300 and 500 GBP: https://www.millercare.co.uk/collections/self-propel-wheelch...

A magnesium alloy framed one is only 450 GBP: https://www.mobilitysmart.co.uk/magnelite-self-propelled-whe...

So what am I missing?

These wheelchairs are custom built to your dimensions. They're not adjustable one-size-fits-all ones.

There's another article by the same author about their quest to get a custom titanium chair paid for by their insurance - https://newmobility.com/finding-the-right-wheelchair/

It's really interesting to learn about all the variables that make a good chair - pressure distribution, the seat height, castor width, centre of gravity and other geometry variables. And all of those are unique to your body.

According to other comments here, a custom titanium chair costs about $4k, so $1k is cheap compared to that.

You are missing the experience of being tied to a wheelchair for a complete day.

None of the chairs you have shown are suitable for daily use. Even the "Magnesium" one.

One of the most important point (beside being the right size) is to be able to move the center of the rear wheels just behind the center of gravity. Too far rear and you have very good stability (hospital chairs), but you need to use most of your strength just to be able to turn (and you take a lot of space for turning). Too far ahead and it becomes dangerous. So it must be adjustable. In theory this should be possible on a cheap wheelchair, but I have never seen it. Probably the weight ditribution is too different (most is on the rear wheel) that the chassis must be thought differently?

I don’t know much about wheelchairs but I watched the video in the article and by the looks of it these are a certain class of wheelchair and they don’t look comparable to what you’ve linked to. My guess is photos are deceiving and there’s a handful of features worth having if you spend your waking moments in one of these things. The reviewer in the video mentioned some features he liked and disliked, wheels specifically can be a huge factor and tend to be expensive upgrades

There are wheelchairs with specific features, such as one-handed folding, so you can get in and out of the car on your own. Models for people with specific needs, different levels of independence and physical ability (hemiplegics).

NaW offers a fairly basic product, which doesn't look foldable, for example.

My first kagi result also shows many options below AUD $1000 (USD $700 or so):

https://www.buywheelchair.com.au/

I suspect it's like anything in the US - despite much of the global research being done there at taxpayer expense, Americans seem to get screwed over on anything health or medicine related. And they continue to argue that their health system is a good one, for some weird Stockholm Syndrome-esque reason I suppose.

I would assume the wheelchairs I linked above are made in China and anyone enterprising could import them for < $500 USD per unit. I also assume their insurance cartel would have an argument why they're not suitable, despite being suitable for the other 7.8B people in the world.

> I suspect it's like anything in the US

I suspect its more of you don't really know the situation at all.

You can get these cheap wheelchairs in the US as well. Here's one for ~$150US.

https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/drive-medical-silver-sport...

You wouldn't want to spend every day of your life in one of these chairs though. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the market for wheelchairs.

> I suspect its more of you don't really know the situation at all.

> You're fundamentally misunderstanding the market for wheelchairs.

You're correct, hence my terms like "assume" and "suspect". Can you enlighten me? My research has not helped me understand the daily impact and variances between a 1x and 50-100x priced product. In most industries the difference is very obvious with this large of a gap.

It is obvious if one bothers to actually look. But instead, you just wanted to hate on the US instead of spending even a minute looking and understanding. Try not letting your biases overwhelm your outlook in life and actually look at reality instead of jumping into assumptions.

The cheap products we've shared here just have a single list of specs for the dimensions. Here's an order form for one of those expensive chairs:

https://permobilwebcdn.azureedge.net/media/npxlfuoh/tr-tra-o...

Just look at how many different widths and lengths and angles and diameters these things are optioned out to. The different sizes, shapes, and styles of support inserts. And for a lot of those measures is not just that it is adjusted to those sizes; it's built to that size by order. There's not just a stock room with size 1, 2, and 3 chairs there; they're all custom made to order. Because everyone is different, with many in wheelchairs having very specific needs in terms of shape and support. It's like comparing a one-size-fits-all t-shirt to a custom-tailored suit and expecting it to be the same price, comfort, and fit.

And then on top of that all the components used in the higher end wheelchairs are just way nicer and far more rugged. Far better bearings. Higher quality fabrics and padding (most of those cheap ones are just plastic slings!). Wheels which are far truer and better built. Things which are welded instead of just cheap bolts and nuts holding it together.

Having a chair that doesn't fit you right or doesn't support you properly leads to more injuries. RSI injuries, pressure injuries, joint injuries, circulation issues, all kinds of other problems. You're bound to develop a whole host of issues if you're going to use one of these cheap chairs all day every day for your life.

It's like asking what's the difference between a wooden stool with a wobble and a $5,000 ergonomic rolling and reclining desk chair. Acting like those differences are non-obvious. Except, it's something the owner has to use every day of their life to go practically everywhere and do anything. For someone who has to be in the chair every day of their life, it is not just luxury. It is injury prevention. It is making their challenging life just a little bit smoother.

I'm certain whoever actually foots the bill for a nice, custom wheelchair wherever you are is probably spending similar-ish money for a similar-ish product. Maybe it is a private insurer, maybe it is the government. But if its someone actually needing to spend their life in a chair, I'd hope whoever is paying buys something far nicer than the cheap chairs we've linked here. They're not good for anything more than being wheeled around in a hospital for a short trip with an orderly pushing it. Or if you're just needing a chair for a few weeks to a month or two.

I do agree the US healthcare system is trash, but not because custom wheelchairs have a somewhat high cost. Its trash because so many end up needing to cover that high cost out of pocket. The people making a high-quality wheelchair from high-quality components should be well compensated in the same way someone making a really nice office chair should be well compensated. But since people need these to effectively function, cost shouldn't prevent people from accessing them IMO.

> Americans seem to get screwed over on anything health or medicine related. And they continue to argue that their health system is a good one, for some weird Stockholm Syndrome-esque reason I suppose.

"U.S. allies ride free on American defense spending. Health care, indeed, is a kind of second NATO."

https://archive.is/sI50E

You're right. Historically, a significant amount of medical innovation came from the US due to the gross abuse of the US taxpayer.

> If the world’s largest health economy limited drug companies to “fair” returns — as other countries try to — then few new drugs would be created.

This simply isn't true as peacetime modern governments are continually turning on the tap for medical and health research, with little to no impact on the public system:

https://vantagemedtech.com/what-country-leads-the-world-in-m...

Both you and the article you linked seem to work off the assumption that nobody would have filled the void without the US. But motivation is reduced when someone else is doing the work for you.

The 3 things you're missing are:

1) How uncomfortable lower end chairs can be for their users

2) How many of the little design decisions in lower end chairs can add up to a lot of pain

3) The chairs you buy online are almost exclusively all made in China using Chinese labor and pricing, where as the one in the linked article is made in the US paying US wages

But I want to talk about 1 and 2 for a moment. My spouse has developed a need for a wheel chair from time to time, so we originally bought a cheap one, just like many of the ones listed there. Specifically we bought one of these Drive chairs for about $140 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008KMKVEK/).

Among the small "papercuts" of using this thing:

* It was extremely uncomfortable after an hour or so. Bringing extra cushions and padding was a must

* The bearings were pretty awful and there was quite a bit of rolling resistance

* After enough times being transported folded up in a trunk, the plastic wheels deformed enough that one side rubbed on the frame every rotation. Not enough to make it unusable, but enough to add even more rolling resistance, in addition to requiring constant adjustments to keep going straight

* Misc bolts and pieces on the frame would catch and lock with each other making un-folding or folding the chair unexpectedly complex at random times

* 41 lbs is a LOT of extra weight to be rolling around with just your arms when you're already trying to roll yourself along.

* There was so much slop in the frame, rolling over any uneven surfaces was an exercise in frustration at best. Everything moved and shifted and your balance was all over as things twisted and buckled under any surface that was a completely flat linoleum hospital floor. In fact the thing that finally did the chair in was a trip to a park where we needed to be rolling over the grass and roots and dirt. A twist too far going over a rough patch of ground broke some of the pieces that hold everything together.

It was a perfectly serviceable chair for an occasional need that lasted us about 4 years of light duty use (some of which was during COVID, so very light duty in some cases). And when we replaced it, we never even considered buying the same one. It wasn't worth the money saved. It's hard to really describe, but all the little pain points made it so that in many ways the chair felt more limiting than the medical condition itself. And we were and are extremely fortunate that we're still able to decide on a case by case basis whether to use or not use the chair. If it was something we had to use every day, all day, I would wager by the end of the first month we would have been looking for something else, and it might have lasted a whole year before breaking.

it seems to be similar with hearing aids. I recently saw a video explaining that the new airpods will be usable as hearing aids. the video went on to explain that this will make them great value for deaf people as hearing aids can run into the thousands of dollars. I just checked and you can get hearing aids in my country for less than $100. so what's going on?

I'm guessing this is either a non-problem, i.e. the expenses are being exaggerated by competitors; or it's some kind of private healthcare thing where everything is insanely expensive because the government doesn't negotiate prices centrally

My dad bought hearing aids that cost like £2000 (private, UK). The market here is kind of split between fairly mundane ones you can buy in shops for £100 or so (or free on the NHS) and fancy ones you get prescribed by an audiologist with computer sound processing that are more like £2000.

My dad's never actually cracked his biggest problem which was if you are at a table with many people talking, picking out one conversation. It looks like the coming Apple AI may actually be able to do that. It's a hard problem technically.

Actually, it isn't that hard a problem technically, you just need a directional mic. I'm deaf, I have NHS issued equipment, and I have a specific setting that makes the mics more directional. Additionally (slightly off topic for the reply, but perhaps of interest) I also have the option of using a discreet wireless mic about the size of a pencap that I can give to presenters or pass round the table. Again, NHS issued, for which I'm very grateful.

"Hearing aids" in the US is a specific medical item. They're programmable with audiograms to the specific individual's hearing needs.

There are those cheap kinda-sorta hearing aids in the US as well, but they're not supposed to be sold as medical devices.

Same in France (literally the first Google link): https://monfauteuilroulant.com/Fauteuils-Roulants/Fauteuil-r...

It looks like a US specific problem.

You can buy that sort of chair in the US for cheap, too. It's not the sort of chair that is being sold by the company in the article.

Went down a bit of a rabbit hole and found this industry guide to Taiwanese contract bike manufacturers:http://www.wheelgiant.com.tw/ebook/flib/2024TBS_%E6%95%B4%E6... If there was enough demand, I'm betting some of the companies in here could make quality wheelchairs real cheap.

There's a group of people in Australia who recycle bicycles into makeshift wheelchairs for people living in countries with inadequate healthcare. They pack flat and are assembled on-site.

https://wheelchairtrust.org.au/

When bikeshare and scooter was gaining traction, I was hoping some manufacturer would look into collapsible electronic wheel chair for mass transportation. Maybe stupid, but think a few 100 million dollars and 1000s of engineer hours would make a pretty sweet slick wheel chair scooter for short commutes.

> if there was enough demand

I really hope there truly isn't in a real sense.

Old and new wars being fought with anti personnel mine and seeing the numbers of young and fit men and women losing limbs to uncaring political goals is disheartening reminder there well might be.

Each wheelchair is custom so it's totally different than other products.

Is it totally different? Bikes are made and adjusted for a huge variety of body types. I understand there are different needs for wheel chair users, but I would think some level of adjustment would be possible to accommodate most of those.

You have to think about scale too. A run of bike frames in a particular size, even for the high end, is probably four digits for a very niche customer. The cost of jigs and prototyping is well spread out.

For a given wheelchair, the market is probably an order of magnitude smaller, if not more so. That means that factory setup and development costs that amortize to $X00 for a bike produced in the thousands, balloons to $X,000 for a wheelchair.

Here is what a wheelchair order form looks like: https://www.adaptivespecialties.com/PDF/TiLite_AeroZ_series2...

not at all I've been buying wheel chairs for my sister for a decade now. finally electric ones from china are getting to $1500-2000 range, before it was $10k-20k when they can scam insurance companies

Sounds like you aren't buying custom wheelchairs then.

This is what the order form for a custom wheelchair looks like. Look at the customization possibilities: https://www.adaptivespecialties.com/PDF/TiLite_AeroZ_series2...

It would be nice to see a little more of this in the world. Thank you Cambry and Zack Nelson.

Meanwhile in Europe, you can buy a wheelchair for 558 euros (about 620 USD).

https://monfauteuilroulant.com/Fauteuils-Roulants/Fauteuil-r...

Late to the party, but I just wanted to say how refreshing it is to see an accessibility-related post on HN that isn't about a bunch of able-bodied MIT undergrads winning awards from able-bodied judge panels for building a product that disabled people can't use to solve a problem that disabled people don't have.

There is effectively zero overlap between problems that able-bodied people think that disabled people have, and problems that disabled people actually have.

I just watched a factory tour of this yesterday: https://youtu.be/oBId9w7NgAQ Seems like they are setting up a pretty fancy operation using their YouTube money. Pretty cool!

It's cool how they get both capital and distribution from their YouTube channel. Are there any other "real" business started from YouTube like this?

The stuff Zack and Cambry are doing seems like it can exist even without the YouTube channel, once it reaches a point of awareness in the community and becomes self-sustaining.

Most of the other YouTube products I see seem like they'd die quickly without a YouTube personality to prop them up. They aren't really filling gaps in the market, or doing something new, they're just slapping their name on something as a way to diversify their income sources. Some do seem to put a good amount of effort into helping with the design, or even work directly with the manufacturers, but they're entering crowded and well served spaces, where their primary differentiation is their YouTube channel. Fans are their target market, and I find it unlikely that most will grow beyond their audience. I don't see LTT becoming the next Craftsman, or MKBHD becoming the next Nike.

Zack started out with the knife, which was a play on his YouTube success, but the various wheelchair adjacent things he's made stepped it up considerably. Others could do the same. It makes sense to test the waters and make some mistakes on something small before shooting for the moon. Time will tell how it plays out for all of them.

If nothing else, having some of these examples could inspire kids to want to start businesses making stuff instead of just wanting to be YouTube famous.

There’s Hank and John Green’s https://good.store e-commerce website that sells socks, coffee, and soap and donates 100% of the profit to charity.

It’s a borderline example since they largely sell to their fans, but the products have broad appeal and are not branded with their names like most YouTuber products.

They are aiming for the “Newman’s Own” model of creating good products and then donating 100% of profit to charity.

Youtuber Mark Rober started CrunchLabs from his youtube channel.

for better or worse the entire Mr Beast empire and, to an extent, Logan Paul and his ventures (Prime, etc)

These never made it further than "I'm buying this because I like MrBeast/Logan Paul/etc." at least as far as I can tell. These wheelchairs are supposed to become good enough that any regular disabled person that can't walk* will seriously consider them even without knowing who makes them.

*English isn't my first language, no idea what a proper inoffensive way to describe the target audience is. I mean no harm :)

I ordered a Beast Burger on Door Dash without having any clue it was a Mr Beast thing until it showed up and was heavily branded. I wanted a burger and figured I'd try something new. I had never really watched any Mr Beast videos at that point. For whatever reason, he is never recommended to me.

The seasoning was so strong it was a bit hard to eat. I assumed it was covering up for lower quality meat or something. I have no desire to order one again.

Mr Beast burgers werent even a real restaurant. Theyre just faceless ghost kitchens with a mrbeast sticker slapped on top.

As it pertains to the original query of this comment thread, whether this is a real business model, it doesn’t really matter that it’s not “a real restaurant,” what matters is whether it’s a viable business that makes money.

Mr. Beast burgers is not really that different than McDonald’s franchising if you really think about it. Most people don’t buy a McDonald’s burger based on who the franchise owner is and how they run their restaurant, they’re buying a McDonald’s burger because of the McDonald’s brand and product.

McDonald’s captures 80% of ~~revenue~~ net income and leaves only 20% to franchisees.

Essentially, the concept is the same: the business value and profit margins are owned by the brand and the laborious act of delivering the product locally is a thin-margin interchangeable “ghost kitchen.” Not only that, the power dynamic is one where the franchise dominates the franchisee. The physical kitchen, its owner, and its employees are replaceable, the nationally recognizable brand is not.

I would argue that ghost kitchens basically take the franchise concept to the logical 21st century conclusion: essentially, why bother doing all the expensive stuff that McDonald’s does with their franchises when your storefront is digital and anyone with a flat top, fryer, and a pulse can follow the directions to produce your fast food product?

>McDonald’s captures 80% of revenue and leaves only 20% to franchisees.

Most of the revenue goes to paying employees, real estate cost (rent or depreciation), energy cost and cost of ingredients. You mean, "captures 80% of the net income". Or profit.

Yeah I think you’re right.

The numbers I’ve been able to find are:

4-5% of gross sales as franchise fee

8-12% of gross sales as rent (McDonald’s corporate is often the landlord)

I.e., 12-20% of gross sales are going to McDonald’s.

I’ve tried various things from ghost kitchens via Door Dash. Some are better than others.

From the little I understand, someone like Beast Burger would come up with a recipe, then provide the supplies and recipes to the ghost kitchen to make it. If the ghost kitchen is really Chili’s, it’s not the Chili’s burger showing up when a Mr Beast label, it’s Chili’s Employees in the Chili’s kitchen, making the Beast Burger recipes.

The quality control on the Mr Beast Burger was so bad he sued the virtual kitchen company that was producing it https://www.aol.com/mrbeast-sues-shut-down-ghost-110013067.h...

My understanding is that they had massive QC issues. I ordered one on a lark and actually liked it, ended up getting a few times. But from what I've seen online that was not a universal experience.

I disagree mostly on the basis of Prime.

I see Prime in basically every convenience store, it seems to be a generally successful drink brand.

I knew about the drink before I knew that it had anything to do with Logan Paul and KSI.

those logan paul Prime drinks are now in every convenience store. I don’t notice any logan paul related obvious branding.

From what I understand these drinks are massively popular amongst children (which I guess is Logan's primary demographic). I've never seen anyone over 30 buy one.

I think you mean promotion instead of distribution?

It did not occur to me that wheelchairs are this expensive. But then again they make fewer of them than bicycles and a bicycle you want to be on hundreds of days a year can start at that price and go up into car prices.

It's odd seeing the number of dismissive comments missing that there are whole categories of wheelchairs for different purposes. It's like asking why XPSs exist when there are Chromebooks, something most people commenting here would immediately realize as a silly question because they suit different needs and functions but the idea doesn't come up because it's an unfamiliar problem.

That sort of “I googled for 30 seconds, and found a cheaper option, why does this project exist” type response is anti-curiosity and anti-learning.

It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.

> anti-curiosity and anti-learning

You nailed it. If I could go a bit deeper, I think the drive-by cynicism comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of people.

Statistically, you are probably not significantly smarter or dumber than most people you meet. In other words, someone who has spent months or years on a problem probably knows more about it than you do if you’re just now reading about it. So if someone with more experience is doing something you think is dumb, your first reaction should be to ask why rather than dismiss.

Especially if one of the people is an engineer/maker and the other has the lived experience of being a wheelchair user. It’s wild to think they might have embarked on this venture without first googling for thirty seconds to see what else might be on the market.

I couldn’t upvote this enough. A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.).

I see it a lot in practice especially when discussing early-stage business ideas.

> A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.).

You're talking if guys pitching overpriced and underquality gear is completely unheard of, or if flawed business ideas are a rare occurrence.

I get it, support and enthusiasm is always nice to have. But if you descend into the real world you'll see that more often than not you'll see a mix of fraud and overconfident people pitching undercooked ideas that they under deliver, and you're criticizing those who might as well have experienced that first-hand for a few times.

There's another choice, though: instead of being a drive-by cynic, just move on and don't comment.

It's not like these people are providing a valuable service, steering everyone away from the dumb scams. They're just pattern matching and assuming everything they doesn't seem to make sense (in their generally not-well-informed opinion) must be bad.

It's unnecessary, and is noise just as often as it's not.

> There's another choice, though: instead of being a drive-by cynic, just move on and don't comment.

Unfortunately that recommendation is also pushed by snakeoil salesmen.

Well, I guess since I disagree with you, I must be an inhabitant of this non-real world. Dang, I wish I’d thought to deem myself the arbiter of reality.

But from here, floating in the imaginary clouds, the error of the cynics was pretty easy to spot. It was that there are different types of wheelchairs and the cynics were just googling up the bargain-basement mass produced ones. I guess in the real world everything (including medical devices) is one-size-fits-all?

> just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions

The word you're looking for is "arrogance." HN comment sections are no better than reddit, if not worse, with people arrogantly making all sorts of statements that are demonstrably false with a simple google search.

HN demographic is worse in the sense that you have more people who think if they earn more than they peers their opinion weights more.

>It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.

Seems insane to assume that but we see it in tech all the time where someone unknowingly spends a ton of money on reinventing something that already exists.

If you have some actual knowledge about a thing and can explain why it's pointless and already existed then that's a great thing to post. That's very different from just assuming that something you have no knowledge about is pointless, though. We certainly see lots of pointless reinventing in tech, but if something appears to be a pointless reinvention of something you could find in 30 seconds with no prior knowledge, it nearly always isn't a pointless reinvention of that and you just don't know enough to understand what's different.

his wife is in a wheelchair, i think he did know wheelchairs exist before making a wheelchair company

It is possible, but one thoughtful takedown by somebody who actually knows the field is worth more than an infinite number of uninformed googled results.

> someone unknowingly spends a ton of money on reinventing something that already exists.

I think it’s worse than than. Amongst the people doing the work, someone usually knows that there is a product out there that already does the job, but the higher ups think they know better.

That works the other way too.

Somethings the higher ups don't know anything in detail, and just believed the new hire guy who said "I can't believe you're still using jQuery! We need to throw this all out and re write it in Angular!".

And then believed the next new hire a few years later who said "I can't believe you're still using Angular - they screwed up the 2.0 to 3.0 migration so badly how can we trust them any more? We need to throw this all out and re write it in React!".

And then believed the next new hire a few years later who said "I can't believe you're still using React, Facebook are awful! We need to throw this all out and re write it in Flutter!".

And then believed the next new hire a few years later who said "I can't believe you're still using Flutter - Google are bound to graveyard it any day now! We need to throw this all out and re write it in React - its new features are _amazing_!".

And today they're 2 years into the latest rock star new guy's 6 month rewrite of the entire front end using Rust and wasm. He's _almost_ got it working on his laptop, it'll be ready for testing with the staging backend platform any day now.

Meanwhile the company's B2B sales team are doing several million dollars of MRR from clients using the "legacy" jQuery front end from 2012. And the backend Java guys are all WFH and haven't had a single bug fix of feature request ticket in 3 years. They cosplay "scheduled maintenance" every 3 months by sending out notification emails to all customers and then just writing reports to management claiming successful updates with zero downtime and no measurable increase in latency or error rates. Half of them have second jobs or side gigs that pay more than their salary there.

> Seems insane to assume that but we see it in tech all the time where someone unknowingly spends a ton of money on reinventing something that already exists.

There are a couple of reasons for that. The most obvious is that they did not do their research prior to embarking on the project. The less obvious is they did extensive research before embarking upon the project. Plenty of tech popped up in the 70's and 80's that flopped or only found a niche market, that later turned out to be quite popular. Sometimes the tech wasn't ready, other times it was just too expensive when it was introduced, yet other times he market simply wasn't ready for it.

Asking a question is "anti-curiosity"?

The piece raises at least a half-dozen possible answers, not all of which are compatible. The author pushes the "low cost" angle quite heavily at the start, so there being much cheaper options is reason enough, IMO, to ask the question what the point of the project is.

They say the chair won't make money, but it's a for profit company. They say they want it to be employee owned and to make their employees lots of money.

The author basically says 'it's a good second chair' (not a quote) that lacks in some features their own chair has. The piece also talks about cutting out expensive considerations like assessment by a physio and assessment of pressure points - that doesn't sound great, although if it's just a second chair, maybe those matter much less.

It seems more like the YouTubers decided to make a $2M wheelchair - real estate, machinery, employees, etc. Then see if they could spin it out to a short lead-time, online customer-specified production.

Good luck to them. Hopefully it will turn into a great example of a cooperative that's producing well-engineered affordable wheelchairs.

>Asking a question is "anti-curiosity"?

It's not asking questions though there's a lot of saying 'how is this cheaper? I found this crappy thing on amazon [that's clearly a completely different design] . why are they making this?!'.

I've yet to see a cheaper option that's the same type of chair. The ones I keep seeing posted are collapsible ones that are used in hospitals which are much heavier and way worse than the product in the article, they're not fitted to the user and much more likely to cause issues. When comparing to a similar product these chairs actually are much cheaper than what's out there.

Indeed. If I google for 30 seconds, and see a stark contradiction with what somebody offers, I try not to conclude that that the guy in question is a fool. This is always possible, but rarely true.

Instead I conclude that likely my understanding is lacking, and maybe educating myself a little bit would be beneficial. Either I find out something new and potentially useful about the world, or finally see through a swindle and understand how it works, which is always a good skill to exercise.

Probably because of the title. A 1$k wheelchair doesn't sound like anything special. While their selling point is that it's a $1k wheelchair that is actually worth that money.

> anti-curiosity and anti-learning

It's the epitome of current state of the internet. We're on a social platform with coins to be gathered, which doesn't induce a deep, well though discussion, rather short snarky comments that gets clicked.

It’s like being outraged and asking “Trek and Cannondale exist, why do we need fifty other bike makers?” When some new manufacturers pop up.

I don’t get the negativity.

One of the more valid use cases for AI is scanning forums an auto-labeling/hiding low quality comments.

Low quality comments or comments you don't agree with?

My cynical assumption is that most startups start out with a grand vision that they overpromise and underdeliver on. Especially if it's a content creator, where I assume that they started with a need to monetize their brand and then came up with a product idea.

This guy claims to be different in that he has enough money already and he's just trying to make the world a better place, but pretty much every startup makes claims about how they're different and therefore they're going to succeed. They can't all be right. I'd prefer to hear unbiased opinions about viability from intelligent people on HN/reddit/twitter rather than biased opinions from the guy who's trying to market his company.

I'm not saying that this wheelchair is going to flop, I'm just defaulting to skepticism of new ideas in general.

He's certainly not an idiot, and it's clear he wants to sell $1000 wheelchairs in order to earn money.

He does not get paid for it though. At least he says so.

I sort of think of left-handed people.

I am right handed, but overused it and switched to a left-handed mouse.

There are basically infinity right-handed mice, but basically zero left-handed mice, most of which are hedged ambidextrous mice.

so looking at office chairs and standing desks and all kinds of ergonomics oriented towards healthy sitting, it seems amazing that there isn't more competition for people who sit more than anyone.

Most left handed people I know (me included), use the mouse with the right hand. Might be a bubble though, but I never thought to get a left handed mouse, or left handed scissors or most left handed things. There's a few things that really don't work (I play my drumkit with hands reversed), but most things are fine.

I tried using a mouse in my left hand in left handed mode back in the day. Eventually, I got tired of changing the settings on shared computers at home/school, and I realized it wasn't any more or less hard to use the mouse with my right hand. Today, I use a right handed vertical mouse. Interestingly, I play guitar right handed, despite being inspired to play by Kurt Cobain. My girlfriend got me left handed scissors as a joke, but man, they actually feel better.

My sister used to use a neutral mouse, with her left hand, on the left side of the keyboard but in "normal" or "right handed mode". Now she has a laptop with a big touch pad in the middle.

I do what your sister used to do. (Left hand mouse use, buttons left at default).

Even game that way. Started using it that way as a kid, by the time I learned it was possible to switch the buttons that seemed less natural than leaving it as default.

Also made it much easier to use shared computers in school labs and the like.

I am lefty and occasionally use the mouse left-sided when I have right arm injuries. What I don't do is swap the buttons. That way, nothing has to change, I can switch to the preferred side at any time, and coworkers aren't stymied when they need to drive the computer.

A lot of left-handed people are actually cross-dominant or selectively ambidextrous.

Keyboard shortcuts aren't as convenient with the mouse on the left. The most useful ones are all biased to the left of the keyboard. Left Ctrl is also easier to hit reliably.

In school for fun when it was boring I many times would do writing exercises with the right hand (like write a line of A's, a line of B's, etc) and after a couple of weeks I got the right hand up to maybe 80% speed and accuracy of the left, but I realized I needed to do constant training to keep it as good as the left (admittedly the left had daily training of many hours due to having to take notes, etc). But it does sound plausible!

I would have been left handed when an early childhood injury caused me to switch to right. A few years ago I thought about that and tried re-learning some skills and tasks with the left hand.

It's specific to each task but I can normally get the left handed version as good or better than the right. I am willing to bet most people could do this, you just have to spend a bit of time awkwardly re-learning.

Same here.

I felt comfortable with "neutral" mouses that aren't shaped right or left that I could use either with right or left hand

I use dual mice for variety sake.

The Logitech G300s has been solid as a lefty. They used to be cheap enough that replacing them every couple of years (depending on usage) was feasible, but I'm not sure if the market has driven up prices since then.

Sounds like a nice application for 3D printing tbh. Take the electronics from a regular mouse and fit into a left-handed housing with a range of shapes/sizes etc available! Call it "second hand"

At least one guy on reddit did this and is still sending out the files for people who ask: https://old.reddit.com/r/MouseReview/comments/enxzgg/lefty_g...

It seems like a massive pain though. Rebuilding a non-symmetrical mouse the other way would take electronics tinkering as well as 3d printing, and probably a ton of work to get all the connections and tolerances right.

I am left handed, and I use trackpads with my left hand, but I gave up on lefty mice years ago and use an ergonomic one right-handed.

I'd assume the electronics are very modular and probably just clip into place in a single unit. You do need a battery compartment or something though, and the buttons need to fit well. Wheel can come from donor mouse.

Unfortunately they are not. Mouse motherboards are generally shaped like the mouse, i.e. right-handed, and the side buttons are on ribbon cables too short to move to the other side. Impossible to reorient without serious work.

Sounds like someone could buy a bunch of different mice and x-ray them to look for the easiest candidates. Looking for symmetrical-ish electronics, most of all.

Elecom makes a nice left handed trackball. Employers don't often provide ThinkPads, so I usually use a standard mouse on the left side without swapping the buttons.

I switched to an Apple Trackpad and it basically cured my wrist issues that I was experiencing.

I think the dismissals come because wheelchair users are already painfully aware of the options.

Yes, there are different kinds of wheelchairs, there's no reason a premade, presized wheelchair has to cost thousands and they don't. The premade chairs certainly serve a need - for those who can sort of walk but need the chair to go distances (etc).

But the reason for custom wheelchairs is they are for people who spend all day, everyday in the chair. And that's where the need and the pain is greatest and so exhibiting a "ready made" chair just isn't going to impress them.

If you look at the dismissals in this HN discussion you’ll find none of them are coming from wheelchair users or even people familiar with wheelchairs.

Nevermind that the article is clearly written by a wheelchair-user, for a publication about wheelchairs / related assistive implements, and clearly explains the pros/cons of the pricing and direct-to-consumer sales model, and includes their positive impressions on having used the chair in question as a daily-driver.

In this case the OP is targeted towards people who are already familiar with this type of chair, so I can sorta understand why the reader who has only ever seen the hospital style chair is confused.

It's the lack of curiosity in not taking the small extra mental step of thinking "what niche does this clearly physically different product address?" that's the most galling/disappointing. Or having done the search and found very cheap alternatives thinking, "clearly the person setting up a business creating and with a partner that using these products daily missed that this already exists" immediately instead of looking at why JerryRigEverything might not be an idiot wasting his money.

I think its just how cheap / rudimentary the basic model look for 1K. Like it seems there's a viable Indochino / send measurement to Asia manufacture model and get bespoke product back for fraction of the cost. Or some sort of modular break down kit that you can take to a bike shop to tune to custom needs for less. I admire Jerry's effort, but I think people correctly sees $200 product that cost $1000 in US, and somehow it's considered "affordable".

I haven't seen anyone pointing to an actual equivalent product available for $200 with shipping. The collapsible medical chairs I've seen when searching are not equivalent devices, they're heavier, more tiring and less durable and comfortable than the kind of chair in the article. This type of chair is semi-custom made to fit the user so they don't injure themselves or have unnecessary extra medical issues from using a chair all day and out in the world.

I don't think/know there's equivalent manufacturer over seas, just insinuations it could probably be done much cheaper over seas, customization included. High performance light weight wheel chair "feels" like there's a lot of overlap with making bicycles and I find it hard to believe you can't find a shop in an East Asian bike factory that already has the machines and labourers with years of experience bending aluminum pipes to avoid amortizing capex costs. Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.

Shipping will eat labor savings alive for these. Their frames are rigid so you'd have to either ship them in huge boxes the slow way (terrible for a custom product like this [0]), air freight them (probably upwards of 300 dollars for the size? That's just a wild guess though) or ship them disassembled and take the durability hit that would require. If they were less customized to fit the user you could but it's not the product we're looking at so you can't make them in mass quantity and ship them to a warehouse in the US like you can with a lot of less custom products.

It's also far less like bikes than you're thinking. They have 5 major adjustments for a total of about 25k different configurations. And those don't seem to be majorly exclusive to each other either.

[0] Check out the number of tweaks available in their configurator: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator

Looking the configurator (very cool btw) the bespoke part is a few bends in the front fork, rest of it is modular parts that are fastened together. Looks like you can stuff hundreds of these in a container to bring piece cost down. I do think the big selling point is speed since they talk about months of lead time from other vendors. Regardless, looks like much cheaper than competition - I admire what they're trying to do.

Stocking when you have 25k different variations is a whole different nightmare and massive cost that probably rivals the cost of just making them to order with the right equipment here in the US. Maybe there are common enough configs that people take you could prestock a subset and make to order the rest but it's still a huge amount of work and cost to manage and stock that vs the option they took of making the frames to order.

>Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.

We sorta have that with everything though, you can source direct from china for a fraction of the cost, but the often pay several multiples of the actual cost for someone else to import it and provide the level of support and QA you expect from products.

TW also makes a lot of bikes. The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike, but I don't know how much component costs for wheel chairs are. Again, speaking from ignorance, this looks like $200 of assemble at parts that can then be taken to a bike shop to tune up for another $100. IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product and it's hard to see the value of US premium and then discover this is "budget" version.

>The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike

Only because bikes are made up of commodity parts from many suppliers which drive the costs down, whereas this is mostly bespoke.

It is hilarious that people keep throwing out prices of $200 or $500, when $200 might get you close to the cost of one of the wheels on this.

>IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product

Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are.

> Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are.

I think that's what people are missing.

His competition is $5k wheelchairs that are often pictured with another $10k + of customizations.

I don't think that most people realize that $5k wheelchairs don't come with so much as a seat cushion as standard.

Looks like very little bespoke parts - the front pork pieces, that's some worker feeding pipe stock to an expensive machine after punching a few numbers for $10 an hour. The wheels are commodity, can't imagine the BOM for something like this is >$200. Competitors are other western companies charging even more exorbitant prices, they managed to charge less which is great. But that doesn't mean the cost is not still overall absurd for what you get. Maybe reasonable American manufacturing prices, sure, it's a good value product. I'm not familiar with the machine, but I've priced out bending aluminum pipes for various architecture details and fitness equipment and per piece price is peanuts in Asia compared to fabricating in NA.

How can you even judge how basic it is just from the photos?

A $10k bike designed for racing has the same kind of components as a $100 bike from Walmart, but every single one of them is far, far better - better materials, higher tolerances, a geometry finely tuned to the rider. None of that is really obvious until you look closely. A rally car looks kind of like a road car, until you realise that it only shares a few body panels - every other component is built to a far higher spec.

Maybe this would be a $200 product if he was mass producing them to the same dimensions. But he's not, they're custom made on order to the dimensions of the user.

I've owned a few low cost Chinese bikes, and while they're OK, there's always parts on them that fail because they're clearly made to be as cheap as possible. If I depended on a wheelchair for moving about every day, I'd be damn sure it was well built and reliable. That's the market he's operating in.

I don’t know anything about wheelchairs, but there’s a similar very high-margin market for eyeglasses. Freakonomics did a podcast about it:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-your-eyeglasses-cost...

Frames have crazy 100x markups and the market is dominated by a small number of companies. They interviewed people from Warby Parker (a newer, more inexpensive brand) and even they said they had to raise prices so they didn’t seem like knock-offs.

"I don't get it, you can buy a laptop from Walmart for $75, what's the problem"

Individual preference is offensive to a certain kind of worldview.

It's not odd because as you pointed out this is a tech oriented site and not a wheel chair oriented site.

There are forms of technology other than software, and wheelchairs are one of them. YCombinator has invested in dozens of medical device startups... including devices in the mobility category: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trexo-robotics

You expect too much of people.

Please stop. These cynical drive-by comments add nothing to the discussion.

I get it but the acting surprised feels condescending and annoying itself. Maybe I should have articulated that better. There are always ignorant people. Always. Take that opportunity to answer their questions and move on. Not this "I know right. gawd. youd think theyd know better..." come on man, that's just rude. Like of course, there are gonna be questions and confused people. Don't be condescending and act all surprised.

The hope is that it is a site full of thoughtful people who’ve done at least a couple difficult projects. For that sort of person, the first instinct should not be to try and invalidate a project based on a couple seconds of googling. We should know that sometimes the problem takes more than a couple seconds of research to get to the real problem statement.

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It's not but the concept that there may be more than one sub-type of a product (here: manual wheelchairs and their subtypes: "medical" [0], transport, etc) because there are many different scenarios for using any product is a universally applicable idea. You don't have to know much to see the cheaper types, see that they're physically different and figure out that there's a reason for there to be different types.

It's an endemic problem in many fields but you see it a lot with programmers. It's the same class of cognitive bias that births ideas like "the law should be like a program, that would be much simpler" that were (still are?) big in tech circles. Lazy pattern matching and thinking that understanding one complex thing (programming) makes one automatically better at unrelated fields (complex manufacturing).

[0] The type most people are most familiar with, large wheels, collapsible, handles for assistance from others. Generally not used by people who are able to move under their own power.

[1] similar to "medical" but without the large back wheels so they're only mobile with another persons help or by scooting around using your feet.

This pretty much embodies why I love hacker engineering. Solving hard problems by itself is fun, making peoples lives better in the process makes it really worthwhile.

If it pans out, looks like an OK way to get a backup chair. But we still need the mainstream way, which is the seating specialists and therapists to accurately spec, size and adjust the chair with the user in it.

Curious if they will go get FDA approval, so that they can get the chair properly funded. I suspect that the same people who don't have health insurance also won't have $1000 lying around. If the chair is funded, they should be able to access a larger market and help more people going that route.

For power wheelchairs, FDA application process is a huge reason they have limited competition and are so expensive. For those who love to wave their hands and cut red tape, I think it mostly has to do with people not dying because they are set on fire by power wheelchair battery fires, or getting crushed by their wheelchair actuators.

I am just curious about this from a safety perspective. The FDA approval process covers a lot of ground. Who makes sure the chairs are safe? Who checks the pinch points? Who crash tests the transit tie downs? Who does fatigue testing? Who does tip-over testing? What happens if someone is using the chair and gets hurt due to a material or design flaw? Who makes sure the chair fits properly and users don't get repetitive stress injuries? Who tests the upholstery to make sure it is fire retardant? Who checks the chair with the user in it to make sure they have posture that doesn't lead to severe long term problems?

I, for one, would not consider sidestepping FDA in order to ethically and legally answer for all of those risks. But despite all of that I admire the sentiment of this project, it certainly seems to be done with the best of intentions.

I'm surprised there isn't some cheap option from China. There must be millions of wheelchair users around the world, it's a small market but it's not tiny.

There should be an IKEA for medical devices relying on scale to absorb design, testing and regulatory compliance.

The AirPod hearing aid feature and other OTC hearing aids from headphone manufacturers demonstrate it’s possible to leverage modern consumer electronics improvements for devices with a higher engineering barrier to entry than a wheelchair.

I think paying a premium for anything via insurance is detrimental to markets and only benefits bottom feeding bandits and deferring or deflecting the cost.

I'm really curious about the hearing aid feature, but haven't seen any review actually featuring a patient using it in a real world situation. I was assuming there would be pre FDA approval reviews, but doesn't seem to be the case.

The older accessibility feature didn't seem to be that great, and I'm pretty eager to see how much it improves through the complete revamp of it before throwing money at it.

$1k for a manual wheelchair? and that is considered cheap?

I have no idea why a wheelchair should be that expensive. We get them here in India for far less - you can buy pretty good wheelchairs for much less than $100. You can get powered wheelchairs for around $500.

https://www.amazon.in/b/ref=dp_bc_aui_C_3?ie=UTF8&node=11365...

Here in Malaysia we can get pretty good quality wheel chair for US$46. I am genuinely surprised to see people consider $1k cheap for a wheel chair!

https://www.lazada.com.my/products/gt-medic-germany-ultra-li...

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Those are not good wheelchairs for independent people to spend 16+ hours in.

I work in EMS and see all kinds of "budget" wheelchairs and they'll all shit.

The parts alone for this lightweight chair have to crack $300.

Don't forget labor: welding lightweight, exotic materials requires a lot of experience, as every imperfection in the weld will lead to it cracking with time, which would be extremely dangerous.

Wheelchair market is ripe for IKEA.

I don't doubt it, but just out of curiosity, could you elaborate the ways in which they're shit?

see my earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41721976

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I am not a wheelchair expert but $1k is quite a lot, also there are quite a lot of cheap options in Europe for less than ~$350 and some of them are covered by the public health care system.

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Customized to your dimensions wheelchair. Because people shopping for these are permanently disabled and are looking for long term comfort and performance. Performance meaning the chairs can actually be used to enjoy life instead of being a fragile "medical chair".

There are plenty of sub $200 wheelchairs on US Amazon.

Even then it shouldn't cost $1k. A customised wheelchair will still use the same wheels. Most likely the only customisation available may be for the width/height of the chair. Not a big deal of work at all.

Let me use a car analogy.

I have no idea why a car should be more than 10k. On Amazon you can get a go-kart for less than 100: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=go-kart

It is really the same comparison. A true every-day wheelchair or a "hospital" wheelchair that will make you sweat after 10 yards

Please see the link i sent. These are good wheelchairs. There is ZERO reason why a cushioned seat on a pair of wheels should cost more than $1K. I am always amazed at the extent to which Americans go to justify the crazy cost of medicines, healthcare, equipment etc in the US. Folks, you are being taken for a ride. Don't keep making excuses for the profiteering healthcare companies in the US.

How do you know they are good? Did you use one for an extended period of time?

A set of wheels and a cushion do not make a good wheelchair, if you want to live an active life. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41721976

I am from Europe and chairs are a bit less expensive here, but an "active" wheelchair is usually more than 2k$ anyway, often closer to 3k$. And some are much more than that (for instance if you want a soldered chassis)

I have family members who have been life long users of wheelchairs

Tapping into the collective wisdom of wheelchair enthusiasts of HN. What would you recommend for my parent, they are using a crappy Medicare approved Medline wheelchair that’s like $300 on Amazon.

They can’t use their right side of their body really due to a stroke paralysis. They can wheel around with one arm and leg.

The wheelchair is like starting to fall apart. What should I I get them that will last many years? Thanks!

There are a lot of variables. You can ask an occupational therapist about what sort of wheelchair would be best.

If it's a case where they move themselves indoors but get pushed by others outdoors, it arguably does not matter.

But if they are independent outside the home, you need a custom chair suited to them.

I know nothing about wheelchairs, but have you considered one with a joystick?

>> It’s mesmerizing to watch. When the laser is done cutting, sometimes the leftover material just falls out, but sometimes it stays in place.

Please be very careful when watching an industrial laser, particularly one cutting shiny metal. I would honestly support any reg that puts hard barriers between eyeballs and running laser equipment. Invest in a good camera and watch the show on a screen.

It is enclosed. They show a picture later and there's a green safety window to view the work piece in the machine, that material will be designed to block whatever wavelength of light the laser is using (most likely IR, and what do you know safety glasses for the IR bands are mostly green).

No. Such materials are designed to let through all but the narrow wavelengths expected of the laser. And some IR "shields" actually reflect IR light rather than absorb it. A proper laser shield should not be engineered to do the minimum necessary. Metal works. Wood works. Even blackout curtains bought at walmart can work.

Properly rated safety shields can absolutely be transparent and properly block the necessary wavelengths. The color comes from the wavelengths they're blocking. Weird stance to take that the entire industry is wrong about laser safety.

Lasers emit a known frequency unless they're extremely expensive and designed to create broad spectrums, it's only with cheap consumer units you'll see IR diodes being poorly upconverted to a different color with IR leakage. These cutters use CO2 or fiber lasers and IR is the desired output..

I just did a search for wheelchairs on the German version of Amazon. I'm not in the market but I was just curious.

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/bestsellers/drugstore/28602980...

There are lots of models with very reasonable prices and features; mostly well below 1000 euros. Including a few electric ones. Manual ones seem to be generally well below 500 euros. At 1000 euros we're talking some seriously tricked out models with all sorts of features that I'd probably want if I was in the market. I'd probably spend a bit more. And I'd be very surprised to not get support from my insurer for this.

The model in the article pretty bare bones in comparison. Not just a little bit. Like really bare bones. I'm sure it's great and ergonomic and really good quality. But what's the real story here? Inept US manufacturing or corrupt US insurers? Or both?

For reference, I just found a very reasonable looking electric wheelchair for 999 euros by a company called WISGING. With some 5 star reviews from buyers. In stock. Would arrive around 9 October if I ordered it now. 20km range, apparently.

The stuff on Amazon looks like it comes mostly from China where they are probably producing these things in large volumes to provide affordable, decent wheel chairs for whomever needs them around the world.

The world is bigger than the US and people use wheel chairs all over the place. The kind of pricing and quality cited in the article in the US would be completely unacceptable in most parts of the world. And never mind the shipping times. Is it not possible to simply import these things? I'm sure there are some tariffs to deal with but even so, what's stopping people here?

If you’re not in the market, I find it ironic you think you can assess if that $999 electric chair or those sub-$500 manual chairs are good deals. From the other comments here it seems like they aren’t.

Everyone is whooooooshing on this because they literally don't understand using wheelchairs.

Not-A-Wheelchair is offering wheelchairs customized to your dimensions. Many insurance wheelchairs that cost $$$$$ are also custom built/fitted to your dimensions. There are absolutely cheap wheelchairs in the US. But people in wheelchairs due to permanent disabilities want comfort and rightfully deserve it. The designs being worked on here by Not-A-Wheelchair are basically all "lifestyle" chairs, rather than boring "temporary injury" chairs.

it's funny seeing comments like this on the same website where people insist- not unreasonably- that buying $3k ergonomic office chairs and motorized sit-stand desks for office workers is a must. Why can't they sit on piled up packing pallets? It's much cheaper and still kind of chair-shaped.

I don't believe the parent comment is saying people who need wheelchairs should get a cheaper worse option, they are pointing out that reasonable options in Germany exist for less than a grand whereas in the US, these reasonable options are borderline unaffordable

The Amazon results in the US are basically the same. You can buy chairs for $200 in the same way you can buy a bike from Walmart for $200. $200 chairs aren't suitable for day-to-day mobility, especially outside. This article I found in another comment explains the difference:

https://www.sammcintosh.com/blog/wheelchairtypes0620

Hospital chairs and everyday chairs are both technically wheelchairs, but they are totally different products for different purposes.

We're not talking about tech bros here but ordinary people desperate to get any wheel chair at all and then having to settle for some garbage quality insurer approved over priced thing that may or may not ship on a 6 month schedule.

I don't think these wheel chairs have any magical properties over the stuff used in Germany. Other than that they are really expensive.

You can buy that sort of chair in America too, often called "hospital" chairs, for about the same price. They are "one size fits all" and therefore don't fit anyone. They are not designed to be used long-term. This link from another comment explains the difference:

https://www.sammcintosh.com/blog/wheelchairtypes0620

If you need a wheelchair for a couple weeks it's fine. If you need it for life, not so fine. People who can't afford a proper day chair or are mired in insurance hell sometimes make do with them, but they can suck ass. They're totally different products and are suitable for different uses.

They're different chairs; $200 hospital chairs on Amazon have no relationship to the price of the sort of chair the company from the article is working on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41716302

I would love to see some comments from German wheelchair users on this. I don't think US has particularly high or different standards for this stuff. I do know its healthcare system is a bit of a basket case.

The chairs on Amazon.de and Amazon.com are the same exact cheapo "hospital" chairs that aren't suitable for long-term use for most people. Germans aren't all zipping around on cheap hospital chairs any more happily than Americans are.

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/PEPE-Wheelchair-Lightweight-Trans...

https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Medical-Wheelchair-Removable-Fo...

Resale value is important for wheelchairs. My dad had an electric one for about 8 months before he passed on, and the TCO was well under the price of all these alt concepts.

As I understand, it doesn't even have a motor? Why cannot we have an electric wheelchair for everyone today? How do you climb uphill (or from an underground passage) without a motor?

Also, I don't know anything bout wheelchairs but googling shows that there are Chinese electric wheelchairs below $1000 (don't know anything about their quality).

Traditional power chairs are much bigger and heavier than lightweight manual chairs. They're a nightmare to transport unless you have a custom van with an elevator. They also can't handle curbs.

Ultralight manual chairs are often foldable, and light enough that you can transfer out of your chair into the driver's seat of a car, take the chair apart and put the pieces in the passenger's seat of a normal sedan. That level of independence is huge. Also, you can pop wheelies over curbs and other obstacles.

Finally, pushing yourself keeps you in shape, since you miss out on the baseline exercise from walking. Otherwise you decondition and get weak and fragile. Power chairs are for those who can't push themselves sustainably.

As many others have commented, every user's disability and body is unique. You're spending 16 hours a day in the chair. If it doesn't fit you, you'll get pressure sores or strain injuries. The cheap ones are for people who don't need to use them that much.

Power-assist chairs are pretty neat though, I knew a guy who basically DIYed one, I think from a kit, starting with a manual chair. He could wheel for miles on it and keep in shape.

Yeah, back when I needed a chair I used an ultralight with Yamaha power assist wheels. It was great - a little chonkier than a pure manual but I could go anywhere, plus I got to keep my VW Beetle instead of needing a $100k wheelchair van.

If it's a lightweight wheelchair custom to your body measurements (not a cheap amazon product) the going uphill is fairly easy. There are also attachments like the SmartDrive for steeper grades.

Unless you don't have function in your arms, it's best to avoid a fully electric wheelchair.

That’s a wholesome story. Hope the company stays employee owned for a long time. Seen too many companies which started like this but after exchanging a few hands (ie, ending up in the hands of grand children). It ends up getting scrapped for parts and sold to the highest bidder.

Two passes around the holes with the laser will get rid of the rewelding issue.

https://whirlwindwheelchair.org/

Professor Ralf Hotchkiss used to teach a course at SFSU on how to build wheelchairs.

Hopefully someone does the same thing for rollators (walking frames). I bought a few second-hand for my mum and they were all had disgustingly terrible usability. Brakes that didn't work properly (huge safety issue). Parts poking out (and flying brake-lines) that would catch on everything, or cause mum problems.

One sharp bit at the wheels damaged the skin at her ankle and she couldn't do anything for weeks to recover. It was a very serious problem caused by thoughtless design.

And we are in New Zealand which is better than many places. It is terrible watching people struggle in other countries (or lack access to the simplest requirement).

Good usability is hard enough to find for the smart and strong.

It is extremely hard to find for the weak and infirm. Especially when supplied through government services!

Finding her a wheelchair was hard because she is tiny and needed a teen sized one. But everything available second-hand or through our social services was designed for heavier people with wide arses (imported chairs?). Luckily found a wheelchair manufacturer in my city that had one designed for a teen on special (end-of-line - not manufacturing standard wheelchairs any more - changing to focus on expensive specialist sports chairs).

I find the story of the company inspiring.

As someone that Serves a small, rather shunned demographic, I applaud them.

One difference, though, is that I am not competing with moneyed interests. They can play dirty.

Are there open source community for all things biomedical devices ? even partial exoskeleton (not joking, looking for practical attempts to help elders)

Most of this stuff is still a bit too expensive for DIY, Festool have an ExoActive exoskeleton that might be repurposable - though I think it's designed mostly for holding weight above the head.

There is the 'body braid' that is probably more suited for the tasks that the elderly have trouble with.

You can get a crappy wheelchair for £100 off ebay. The gap from crappy to decent seems very high!

I have no knowledge of this specific product area but wondering what aspect of the wheelchair in the photo results in this seemingly high cost? (to note, I understand that this is still far cheaper than other wheelchairs). Is it the material cost? It looks like it's just a few pipes, a cushion, and a pair of wheels. About the same build as a basic bicycle.

Mostly the machines the factory uses. You can cut tubes by hand and drill those holes, but the machines are more accurate and faster. However those machines will cost you in the million range each in some cases. (the $1000 Chinese versions for home use are kits that will cost you $10k to make accurate and the quality means they will wear out fast so while find for building a couple they are more expensive than the million dollar machines in the long run) That investment needs to be amortized across whatever you build and wheelchairs are not high volume.

You can't go with cheaper less flexible machines either because each wheelchair needs to be somewhat custom fit. That in turn means you need to the more expensive machines instead of simple jigs that. They also need someone to program the machines for your custom fit (or software to create that program)

Fascinating. I assumed that most manufacturing machines can be reconfigured to build anything that machine can handle physically (i.e. not a particularly specialized machine) and, therefore, can be bought for cheap, or used. Coming from software I don't have a frame of reference for manufacturing cost.

Reconfiguerable is common but high cost. most jigs are custom made one offs at high cost. every bit of flexibility will cost you tens of thousands at minimun and millions on the high end. The parts are at most $100, it the engineering and skilled machinist time that adds up.

First, have you purchased a bicycle? "High quality" bicycles start at $1,000. (quality dimensions = weight, comfort, durability, flexibility)

Second, small scale manufacturing is expensive.

Third, large-scale manufactured wheelchairs have the same problem as the rest of the medical equipment world: prices are subsidized/inflated by insurance.

I've only ever owned fairly cheap commuter bikes like Specialized. But even then, the quality and the comfort were OK. I guess in this case, small scale and configurability makes the biggest difference in wheelchairs vs bikes.

Wheelchair users spend their entire waking lives using wheelchairs, more or less.

They are justifiably VERY particular about their mobility.

If you had to spend all day, every day, riding a bike, and a failure meant that you would spend days or weeks (seriously, wheelchair repairs are SLOW), stuck in your house, how seriously would you take your bike options?

A badly fit wheelchair can send disabled people to the hospital with really serious problems.

Now imagine that bikes normally cost $5k-$20k. How stoked would you be to see someone offering an equivalent bike for $999?

It's a relatively small market so the up front capital and ongoing labor costs are probably pretty restrictive. Those parts are more expensive than you realize though with the wheels being the most expensive part if I had to wager, they're critical, specialized, and need to stand up to a lot of abuse.

I toured the Trek factory when they still made them in the US. They'd already drunk from the font of Goldratt wrt to Just in Time, but they would set up each day pretty much to make one model of bicycle for the whole day. Parts, tooling, paint booth, everything. The only thing that changed was sizes, and a model of bike tends to have the same geometries across all sizes. 78º angle here, 99º angle there. That may not be optimal for the rider but it's how you keep prices down and keep product lines from getting confusing.

If that's true of wheelchairs, you can get some economies of scale even if sizes vary. If it's not, then maybe that's one of the things we should tackle.

The bend angle of the tube that forms the seat support down to the legs seems like one of their major adjustment points for comfort and efficiency so I don't think you could have a similar setup. These are essentially semi-custom not a simple size based product like a bike. The extra adjustments are important because the users are in them many more hours a day so small problems can cause long term issues.

Their configurator has a very good model of what the chair will look like and you can see just how many knobs you can tweak and how that requires changing the core layout of the frame in a way that makes the kind of sizing system just not feasible. Scroll down on the Frame page to get to the fit sliders.

https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator

edit: Did the math and there's something like 25k different configurations they're selling before accounting for paint colors, just in the frame measurements. Granted, that's not accounting for the improbability or incompatibility of some parameter sets but that's still going to be a couple thousand different configs to build and stock. It doesn't work like a bike.

On a bike you have a little bit of flexibility due to the way the seat post works. Both in how the seat attaches and adding curves to the post, particularly for triathletes who like to favor their hamstrings over their quads, and sit considerably farther forward than any 'normal' cyclist would.

I know I've seen wheelchairs where the back was a tube that went into a tube. If you put the curve in the replaceable part you get more adjustment but less support. Generally the tolerances on bikes are very tight and medical equipment seems to be all over the place.

They've done a lot of work it looks like to put in user level adjustments everywhere they can but to tweak the parameters on the frame page I don't see a great way to replace that. The curve it's tweaking is setting the angle between the legs and the seat already.

Yeah I went through the build your own UI after your last reply and it looks like a pretty complex bracket there for adjusting the angle of the seat back. From the look of things it's an adjustment versus another bracket.

It looks expensive, but I suspect that not being able to change your mind after you order is awful. Anything from muscle gain to tweaking your back probably makes you want to adjust your seat a bit. So maybe it's worth however many dollars that takes out of the $1k budget to be preserved in the design.

The seat back and center of gravity position both look fairly adjustable. The main fixed quantities seem like they're all on the frame page; seat heigh front and back, frame depth (back of seat to knees), front angle, and frame taper. The rest of the options seem pretty adjustable looking at the frame there's a lot of mounting holes to change all the other measurements.

You also lacks knowledge of bikes: a bike built from similar materials, at a similar quality of craftsmanship and weight would cost you north of $5k.

$1000 seems very expensive. But considering it's always being used, maybe not terrible.

Or, what happens when you take greed and profit out of the equation.

Yessss!

Made in America with humans and CNC robots.

That’s the future we should be aiming for.

So I follow some disability activists and it's kinda depressing just how hostile society is and people are to people with disabilities. And this crops up everywhere.

So for wheelchairs, for example, airlines routinely damage or destroy or lose wheelchairs, like 1000+ a month [1]. You need to be aware that wheelchairs typically need to be customized for the user. You typically can't just buy a wheelchair on Amazon and you're good to go. Using a replacement wheelchair can represent a significant safety risk.

Only now is the DoT starting to take action to curb this [2]. But what other group of people would such reckless disregard and gross negligence be tolerated for?

We just had Hurricane Helene wreak havoc through Appalachia. Usually in these situations people on the outside will criticize those who didn't evacuate. This happened in Katrina too. But you know who often can't evacuate? Disabled people.

Look at our response to Covid. The powers-that-be wanted everyone to get back to work and be busy worker bees that could once again produce value that would be exploited. So isolation restrictions were loosened. We capitulated to the irrational and completely self-centered whims of antivaxxers. There was a war on mask mandates. This went so far in some places as to literally ban masks [3].

This is all despite some people being immunocompromised and Covid never going away. We're essentially decided those people can just die.

But beyond them, you know what else Covid was? A mass disabling event. I'm talking about long Covid. This affects probably millions of people. These once healthy people are going to learn the hard way what the wanton disregard for disabled people looks like.

Anyway, I applaud efforts like cheaper and faster to produce wheelchairs. They won't suit everyone but we shouldn't tolerate a situation where it might take months for someone to get a wheelchair, But can we stop destroying wheelchairs too?

[1]: https://blurredbylines.com/articles/broken-wheelchairs-airli...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234708784/airlines-wheelchai...

[3]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wearing-masks-public-now-illegal-n...

By chance, don't you know why we cannot have electric wheelchair for everyone who needs it? Manual wheelchair seems to be not very convenient and to require lot of effort to use it.

Motorized wheelchairs are not a good fit for everyone. They are much bigger, heavier, harder to transport (you need a van), and even with a clutch to allow emergency non-motorized use, because of their design and weight, they can't be really used without a motor, so you're f*ked if the battery runs out.

They're good for some uses, for some folks, but are not a solution for all.

Newer battery tech is helping improve the “compactness” of motorized chairs. We have a “fold and go” (https://www.foldandgowheelchairs.com/) which can fit in a car trunk (though still want a full size sedan or bigger if you plan on putting anything else in there) and at 60lbs is only about 50% heavier than some of the heavy “standard” chairs out there. Still not something you’re going to move well on your own without an able bodied assistant or some specialized equipment, but compared to older motorized chairs it’s a huge improvement

we barely supply good manual wheelchairs to everyone who needs them, the article talks about why not.

1k for a wheelchair is unbelievable for me. In Bangladesh they cost about 7 to 9 thousands taka which is equivalent 60 to 100 USD. I don't understand.

Those are not custom (typically come pre-sized) and are generally not very usable outdoors to get around other than short distances. Sometimes known as "hospital wheelchairs". For people with temporary injuries who are mostly taking time off from work it's fine.

This is a everyday wheelchair that people can use to get to somewhere a mile or two away and back, often used by people to get to work or around a university campus independently. It is custom made to your measurements: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator

https://www.sammcintosh.com/blog/wheelchairtypes0620

There are obvious COL differences between regions which can account for a huge part of that. There's a reason we lost our manufacturing base in the west to China.

Are the chairs you're speaking of customized? Are they using the components of a similar quality? That may be a component, as well.

>I don't understand.

Almost completely different products.

Those are shitty wheelchairs not meant for use by people permanently disabled by western standards. We have plenty of imported cheap wheelchairs on Amazon in the US.

I mean sure you could use them, but they aren't customized to your body dimensions for life long comfort. They won't hold up to long term abuse actually going outside daily for life and work.

In the west, we actually legally mandate buildings and transportation accommodate wheelchair users, so they can actually live like normal people. Heck they can also legally drive.

Back to the wheelchair, the foundation of this $1k wheelchair which is bent aluminum instead of welded metal is a massive increase in reliability where a cheap chair could instead break a weld and leave someone stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Mormons get it done!

Hah, now it makes more sense why Jerry was being so active on GoodTimesWithScar Twitter feed. Scar is also a wheelchair user, but is mostly famous for his YouTube landscaping videos.

Nice to see this, Jerry is not just another YouTuber grifter, he's a maker and has been involved building for his wife for a while.

His name is Zack, not Jerry. I know, it's confusing.

Meh, lots of people call him Jerry for a while now. I know you're not aware because you're not a fan and just wants to one up on HN.

He said already he chose Jerry in honor of his grandfather who was a fixer. On an interview with MKBHD (btw, I know MKBHD is not literally that guy's name) he said he just rolls with it when someone calls him Jerry.

I know you're just trying to gotcha me, but as a fellow fan you probably already know that he prefers when people call him by his given name.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eG4PZaf7QxY

Home crap. I thought at first this was advertising an expensive wheelchair. TIL.

Isn't this communism or socialism? I thought US citizens were allergic to socialism? That's the only reasonable explanation to why USA still has an archaic, super expensive private healthcare?

"To be clear, Not a Wheelchair isn’t a nonprofit — it’s currently licensed as a benefit company, a newer designation of a for-profit company that provides a public service."

Just wondering - why is it that a bunch of tech bros who would think nothing of spending $2-300 on some fancy-ass keyboard because it’s incrementally more comfortable to their fingertips than a $15 one from Microcenter think that a person doesn’t care about the quality of a wheelchair they’re going to be stuck in for all their waking hours?

More to the point, why are a bunch of techies who are probably sitting on $3000 ergonomic office chairs wondering why a good wheelchair might cost a few thousand?

Given your wonder, you should consider checking out the article. They clearly care a lot about customizations and comfort.

Why are we assuming that this isn't a quality/comfortable wheelchair?

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These are not the same class of products.

The alibaba ones are almost like disposable lower quality solutions, have textile backs, and are foldable, etc. which also have their places and uses eg. after disasters, mass depoyment, handout at hospitals as temporary solutions.

The product in the linked article is clearly a higher quality item intended for longer term use by a single person.

1k$ is the cost of a decent office work-chair from any well-established low-to-medium volume vendor, as context. For a small shop like this it is an okay price, abeit the sum being a lot for many especialy in a new situation where they are forced to a wheelchair. Mass production could probably drive it down a lot, but you need volume for that.

ps: with volume you can also better amortize the engineering costs, which can be significant even for stuff looking simple and easy to do for those who did not do it yet... or did (even significant, core) parts of the product development in a large established firm. I also started a product development for simple looking stuff that turned out to be a lot lot more work when not being done only as a hack/PoC, but developed to a product. I abandoned the product before going for the official certifications (FCC, CE, etc.). For medical equipment they probably also need to meet regulations.

This is like saying a $30 display off Aliexpress is better than a $1000 display from a high quality brand. The only metric it will be better on will be the price, everything else will be a ridiculous comparison.

Shipping makes them pretty consistently $116ish/piece until you hit negotiated shipping numbers.

They're also not the kind of wheelchair people are looking for if they're self mobile which is the kind of chair the article is reporting on. Those are made lighter and more resilient to stand up to being used by one person out in the world rolling themselves around.

> 1k$ is pretty steep.

It's not if you don't want to sacrifice quality, USA made is also a bonus. Kudos to JerryRigEverything.

Go for it bud

Quite frankly this is against the law.

Wheelchairs are considered a class II medical device. Just because you are cheeky and say its "not a wheelchair", its still a wheelchair and is subject medical device regulation.

A wheelchair can cause a sorts of harm if not designed properly and built of high quality.

Wheelchairs… engagement presents… it never ends!

There electric bikes way under $1000, and allow frame bikes under $200.

Just checked and there are $400 wheelchairs out there. How is a $1000 wheelchair an achievement?

I just checked online and wheelchairs here (Canada) can be had for about US $500. What am I missing in this $1K “affordable” wheelchair idea?

Are you looking at "hospital" style wheelchairs, or dedicated use wheelchairs? The difference is huge. Those hospital style, one size fits all chairs are HEAVY, clunky, slow, and tire you out very easily if you don't have someone pushing you. Someone with a spinal cord injury or a variety of mobility constrants would be better off in a dedicated chair like this as they are lighter (sub 20lbs), designed to fit to the user, and offer more comfort which combats things like skin wounds.

If you look at wheelchairs from companies like TiLite or Quickie, you are starting off at almost double this price before any customization (rims, guards, etc). $1000 all in for a dedicated wheelchair is fantastic.

The weight of a bike or a wheelchair matters a lot less when you're at low speeds on level terrain without many turns, which describes a hospital to a T - they have to be able to get gurneys through these spaces, and if you think a wheelchair is heavy then brother have I got news for you.

But the moment you go outside now you're dealing with ramps and hills.

I'm 38, more fit than most, I had to interact with my father-in-law's wheelchair this weekend for the first time. He is 73 and expected to travel with it everywhere, lifting it in and out of some kind of a vehicle. I would _very_ much describe it as heavy, especially in the context of a 70+ (maybe 60+, maybe 50+) year old individual. I'm wondering what the news is.

> What am I missing in this $1K “affordable” wheelchair idea?

Truckloads of paperwork, at least in the EU. Wheelchairs are regulated as "medical devices" since 2017, which does make sense given that people tend to spend a large portion of their day sitting in them and that they tend to be on the upper end of the body weight distribution... but the certifications make them much more expensive than they'd need to be, and they also prevent competition from entering the market.

Additionally, laws of scale apply here as well. Wheelchairs are a pretty bespoke, small scale industry - outside of large orders from civil protection agencies to be used in mass evacuation scenarios (the German THW and Red Cross for example have stockpiles, mostly used in foreign aid/crisis response and WW2-era bomb evacuations), every user has their own specific needs, making mass production all but infeasible.

From the article:

> When I first heard about this, it sounded awesome and a bit far-fetched. It’s hard to find a pair of quality wheelchair wheels for less than $500. Same with a rigid backrest. How were they going to offer both, plus a custom wheelchair frame without compromising on quality?

I have no idea though. Maybe there are sort of like… different classes of wheelchair, and they are trying to make not-terrible one? Like technically $5 headphones exist but not from a hobbyist point of view.

You can get perfectly viable inexpensive bicycles as well - but if you were expecting to replace ALL of your other vehicle transport with a bike would you start by looking at ones with welded steel frames? The classic 80s Schwinn 10-speed that weighs in at 40 pounds but is pretty indestructible?

That's a $500 wheelchair.

$500 buys you a decent enough but hardly "happy to live with" indoor chair. Not the kind of chair that you go shopping in.

Insurance approved I think is the key differentiator.

the article isn't super clear, but it didn't sound like the goal for the $1000 wheelchair was for it to be insurance approved.

Insurance only pays for one chair every 8 years (IIRC, my aunt who was in a wheelchair died a few years back and so now I no longer have family conversations about these details). The ability to get custom chairs for different purposes would be nice. My aunt had an off road wheelchair for using around the yard, back when she could walk around the house (with a cane), but the doctor warned her she would be full time in a wheelchair around the house before the next time insurance would buy her one. So if you can get the expensive wheel chair for around the yard and afford to buy without insurance a second better suited for around the house that would be useful.

In the middle of the article they say that an insurance-approved wheelchair will tend to cost the patient $1000 after insurance. They're aiming for private purchase at the same price.

Most of them are under $200 in Amazon

There are many different classes of wheelchair. Most of the really cheap versions are medical chairs for people who can't move on their own for whatever reason, think the kind you see at hospitals or nursing homes for wheeling people around. This type is for people who can't walk but can still sit upright on their own and can move the wheelchair on their own. They're lighter, rigid and have higher efficiency than the medical type. They're also semi custom or adjustable to fit the user better than the temp/medical kind.

Would you buy an under-$200 bike off of Amazon? Especially one you spent all day on?

I don't know about Amazon, but $200 is the price of a reasonable entry-level bike in any large surface store so yes?

I know this is HN and people will likely look down on anyone riding a <$2000 bike, but come on.

$200 is a reasonable price for a bicycle-shaped garage decoration which gets ridden for 30 minutes per month, which is indeed all that many people want out of a bicycle. Something practical for a 15 minute one-way commute that you ride every day is more like $500 new. Something which you could spend all day every day on would be a lot more.

The question was would you spend that on a device you spend 8+hrs in each day, which is something people often ignore.

This is a device you _live_ in. This is someone's mobility and independence you're talking about. Not a "I spend 30 minutes to an hour a day riding", or a "I commute to work on this" but instead "I use this to enjoy life".

I ride a lot, and am happy to ride cheap bikes, but I probably wouldn't ride a $200 Amazon or Walmart bike for rides longer than 30-40 miles without swapping the saddle, which would add anywhere from $40 to $150.

Most people don't ride their bike every single day, sometimes for 8-12 hours per day.

If you did, you probably wouldn't be particularly happy with a $200 bike.

When our kids were growing quickly, we went through a number of sub-$300 bikes, both new and gifted by family. I ended up doing about one repair every two weeks, including broken derailleurs, junky brakes, jammed wheels, you name it. And our kids did not abuse those bikes.

I ended up buying a bike stand and a basic toolkit just so I could fix those bikes quickly and get the kids back outside. The parts on those bikes were absolute garbage and the reliability was zero.

Meanwhile I have a medium/high-end mountain bike from 1997 that still has some original parts on it, despite having seen time as a daily commuter and a trail bike.

A good thing to look at is resale value. Around here, you can resell a $1200 mountain bike for a good price. But you'd lucky to get much for a $800 bike.

Most bicycles these days are in the $6-7k range easily. I mean you can cycle with a cheap-o but what about your wheels, your lack of suspension? Your brakes? The feeling of a premium amazing handling MTB is something else.

No, there are much better under-$200 bikes on craigslist. :P Get a nice $100 bike from the early 80s and pay a bike store for a tuneup, and you've got a pretty useful bike to ride on all day; gotta friction shift though. Not a lot of great looking wheelchairs on craigslist near me though.

Smart phone under $200, would you want one?

Go to someone who doesn’t know anything about smartphones and he’ll say sure hit me up.

That’s me, I know nothing about wheelchairs, hence why I’m asking.

before clicking the link, I thought it would be something along the lines of a Dean Kamen iBOT chair. Seems like a lot of money for a basic wheelchair.

These aren't basic wheelchairs like at the hospital imo. They are the wheelchairs that someone is going to spend their entire day/life in and use for mobility. Huge difference I think. It's also heavily customizable https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator

hmm... looks like the ibot is available? $25-30k

https://newmobility.com/the-ibot-is-back/

also I looked and a walmart wheelchair is $149. Wonder why it sucks.

Nothing against a product (assuming it does not fall apart) but what I see should cost $200. This is what is fucking wrong with our Western World.

$1000 is exorbitant for a non-motorised wheelchair. Here's [1] amazon.in offering a lot of options at ~$50. I bet these guys could import it from India and it wouldn't cost them more than $200.

[1] https://www.amazon.in/s?k=wheelchair&crid=22DWLE90LFB7O&spre...

How many ergonomic office chairs go for $50?

Wheelchairs take several orders of magnitude more abuse and need to cope with several orders of magnitude more complex needs than your average office worker and your average nice ergonomic office chair is hardly cheap.

Ergonomic office chairs are a ridiculous rip off too.

Can you ask the Amazon seller how much it costs to custmoize the wheelchair to my specific dimensions?

While you are at it, can you ask them how much it costs to make the frame out of a single piece of bent aluminum so there are no risks of welds snapping and leaving me stranded?

You know in the west that wheelchair users actually go outside right? We legally mandate that buildings and transportation require accomodations for wheelchairs. People in wheelchairs even drive cars.

Wheelchair users that are active need far better quality frames than "hospital wheelchairs" you can find for $50. And you can already buy these on Amazon.com US. There is no need to get into a game of trying to compete with the existing importers.

That's really cool. But I also notice that when I go to thrift stores in my area that there are often wheelchairs available for $25 or less. Similar for walkers and other mobility devices that tend to be really expensive new.

This is why reading comments before contributing to the conversation is useful. There are already several comments outlining why a $25 wheelchair, especially a used one found at thrift stores, isn't comparable. Build quality, weight, fit, convenience, portability - all of these are reasons to spend more on a wheelchair.

We don't question why different computers are more expensive than others even though they all do the same job. We don't question why one bike costs more than another despite using the same mechanism for propulsion. Wheelchairs are another good with varying levels of quality at different price points. It's arguably more important for quality goods to be accessible because for many, they're living in these things constantly.

Ehm... Seeing the product... A right price could be more 300$, and only because not made in China, than 1000... If mass produced could be more 150$...

You should do some research into wheelchairs and the differences in designs, materials, and life times to better understand why the $1000 price tag on what the company is offering is actually incredible. This is for someone who has a spinal cord injury and has to be in a chair fulltime, not those hospital style chairs you are probably thinking of.

Well, materials seems to be very common, and indeed even if they are precious alloys to be lighter it's still a very high price. Research have to be payed of course, but again you can sell a product, no more than that.

I've heard many time about "special design", "this price is really right" and so on, all the time it was wrong. Oh, that does not means it's a bad product, it's simply overpriced and the price might even be right seen their expenses and resources, but it's still too much for a market who offer other very similar product at a much little price.

An idea alone does not suffice.

I've mentioned in other comments the difference between "hospital" style wheelchairs and full time use wheelchairs used by people with spinal cord injuries or other mobility issues. Full time wheelchairs are 1/3 or more lighter than the hospital style, more rigid which makes pushing more efficient, more comfortable, and easier to maneuver.

You cannot compare these wheelchairs to what you might sit in at the emergency room, as they are for different use cases and fill different needs. These wheelchairs aren't for "oh I broke my leg and have to use a wheelcahir for a few months". These are for "I will be spending 14+ hours a day in this chair."

Please do some research about rigid frame wheelchairs before saying you don't see how this is a big deal. Companies like TiLite and Quickie START at almost double this price point for similar products.

Amazing that a group of people who are generally the type to be sitting on $3000 ergonomic office chairs are insisting that $50 wheelchairs ought to be enough for anyone.

Well, I'm skeptic as I'm skeptic about 3k$ office chairs. Skeptic about the price, because well, research does have a price, but once you have profited to cover research fees you can't keep selling a not-anymore-new stuff at the same "pioneering phase" price.

That's the reason why Xerox have failed, IBM and Microsoft succeed, GNU/Linux succeed over other unices and so on. It's the same reasons why our EVs who are indeed a bit superior over Chinese ones can't succeed give a mean 4x price tags and their OEMs end-up with lobbying for stellar custom duty and alike to stop them.

Sure, design a light and rigid chair demand a significant research effort, but in the end you give a simple product, you can't count on warm welcome at certain prices. Like designed a road bicycle, it's expensive, you have used complex materials etc, but you can't count on big sales if you push your profit too high.

Currently in the west ALL the few who still produce something have climbed the prices claiming inflation so much that they are no more interesting, competitive respect of China. It's a lesson too many do not want to accept.

Even Walmart doesn't sell bikes for less than like $200 and everyone agrees that they're pretty awful. $1000 for a bike that's essentially custom to your measurements (which is the whole point of these chairs!) and assembled in the US doesn't seem like a ripoff at all.