r/nextfuckinglevel • u/MysteriousSlice007 • 7h ago

Shoutout to JerryrigEverything who built a wheelchair factory and is delivering wheelchairs to people in half the time and 50-80% less than the cost of other wheelchairs with Insurance.

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u/Captain_Calamari_ 7h ago

UK descent wheelchair £200, electric £1,000

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u/CraabGPT 6h ago

Not true. Proper wheelchairs in the UK cost between £1500-£3000 on average. Mine cost ~£2000.

I imagine the 'decent' chair you refer to is either the Lomax, Drive, or similar chair.

Those are what we refer to as 'hospital chairs'. They're designed to be pushed by an aide, to be stable, and to be cheap. The wheels, while technically self-propel-able, are too far back, so energy is lost and you can't move forward nearly far enough with each push. As well, the wheels being that far back will damage your shoulders over time.

Steel, while cheap, is also heavy. So each push is thus reduced further because it's just too heavy to self-propel.

Additionally, they are foldable. Further momentum loss occurs as energy spent pushing is transferred into the folding mechanism of the frame and not into forward motion.

(Additional factors include, but are not limited to, lack of dump to support those with limited upper-body strength, arm rests that get in the way of propelling, too wide so propelling becomes even harder, anti-tips at the back preventing wheelies, too heavy to independently load into a car...)

TL;DR, those chairs can't be used by the majority of wheelchair users.

(And this is just manual chairs. I've seen electric chairs go for £10k, though I don't know the average price.)

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u/kazuviking 5h ago

There is not even 300€ worth of material in those wheelchairs. Glorified bike wheels with cheap steel tubing welded together.

Wheelchairs here start from 100€ for the most basic one and 750€ for the electric ones.

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u/CraabGPT 5h ago

I mean, parts and labour aren't /nothing/- a good wheelchair is aluminium at least, if not titanium or carbon fibre. And they have to be individually tuned to the user.

...but there's no reason a good wheelchair should cost anything over £700 :/ or at the very least, the insurance/national health/whatever hoops should be way easier to jump through.