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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
NYC is awash in bicycle couriers, and they probably ride all the time.
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?
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
And of those people that do, how much do you think they spend on their bikes?
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
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 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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Add a hat and a scarf on a wire and you've got a Halloween prop.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
That said, a quick google says there's 65-132 million wheelchair users worldwide so it's not a small market either.
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.
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.
But, to the point, hospitals don't buy custom wheelchairs.
- 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).
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.
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.
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.
The wheelchair is like starting to fall apart. What should I I get them that will last many years? Thanks!
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.
I think so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R71uDa3DNw
my biggest annoyance is his plugging or advertising stuff too obviously
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...
So the estimate would range from 0.12% to 0.4% (for 8mmt and 25mmt respectively).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They also said they replaced the tires with gatorskins, which are 40€ a piece.
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.
The purchases from 2009 was stolen, and the 2011 bike didn't survive a gnarly crash — to no fault of BikesDirect.com
Would you be willing to pin your entire ability to leave home on it?
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
You either bought this bike used, stolen, in 1989 or are trolling.
Obviously not everyone wants a new hobby of fixing bikes. But its a great time for almost any hacker or maker.
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...
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.
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://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.
A good bike is addictive to ride. It’s like a sharp knife through butter.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Also everyone assumes assembly labor is free.
It's an entire forum of people who have never experienced scarcity so they can't understand it.
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 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.
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.
Fair from them to assume the (average) reader is familiar with the subject.
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?
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.
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?
NaW offers a fairly basic product, which doesn't look foldable, for example.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
"U.S. allies ride free on American defense spending. Health care, indeed, is a kind of second NATO."
> 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.
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.
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'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.
There are those cheap kinda-sorta hearing aids in the US as well, but they're not supposed to be sold as medical devices.
It looks like a US specific problem.
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.
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.
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...
https://monfauteuilroulant.com/Fauteuils-Roulants/Fauteuil-r...
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.
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.
*English isn't my first language, no idea what a proper inoffensive way to describe the target audience is. I mean no harm :)
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I see it a lot in practice especially when discussing early-stage business ideas.
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.
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.
Unfortunately that recommendation is also pushed by snakeoil salesmen.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t get the negativity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
https://www.lazada.com.my/products/gt-medic-germany-ultra-li...
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.
There are plenty of sub $200 wheelchairs on US Amazon.
I have no idea why a car should be more than 10k. On Amazon you can get a go-kart for less than 100: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=go-kart
It is really the same comparison. A true every-day wheelchair or a "hospital" wheelchair that will make you sweat after 10 yards
A set of wheels and a cushion do not make a good wheelchair, if you want to live an active life. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41721976
I am from Europe and chairs are a bit less expensive here, but an "active" wheelchair is usually more than 2k$ anyway, often closer to 3k$. And some are much more than that (for instance if you want a soldered chassis)
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!
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.
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.
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..
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?
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.
https://www.sammcintosh.com/blog/wheelchairtypes0620
Hospital chairs and everyday chairs are both technically wheelchairs, but they are totally different products for different purposes.
I don't think these wheel chairs have any magical properties over the stuff used in Germany. Other than that they are really expensive.
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://www.amazon.de/-/en/PEPE-Wheelchair-Lightweight-Trans...
https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Medical-Wheelchair-Removable-Fo...
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).
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.
Unless you don't have function in your arms, it's best to avoid a fully electric wheelchair.
Professor Ralf Hotchkiss used to teach a course at SFSU on how to build wheelchairs.
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.
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).
There is the 'body braid' that is probably more suited for the tasks that the elderly have trouble with.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Made in America with humans and CNC robots.
That’s the future we should be aiming for.
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...
They're good for some uses, for some folks, but are not a solution for all.
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
Are the chairs you're speaking of customized? Are they using the components of a similar quality? That may be a component, as well.
Almost completely different products.
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 $1k wheelchair which is bent aluminum instead of welded metal is a massive increase in reliability where a cheap chair could instead break a weld and leave someone stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Nice to see this, Jerry is not just another YouTuber grifter, he's a maker and has been involved building for his wife for a while.
He said already he chose Jerry in honor of his grandfather who was a fixer. On an interview with MKBHD (btw, I know MKBHD is not literally that guy's name) he said he just rolls with it when someone calls him Jerry.
"To be clear, Not a Wheelchair isn’t a nonprofit — it’s currently licensed as a benefit company, a newer designation of a for-profit company that provides a public service."
The alibaba ones are almost like disposable lower quality solutions, have textile backs, and are foldable, etc. which also have their places and uses eg. after disasters, mass depoyment, handout at hospitals as temporary solutions.
The product in the linked article is clearly a higher quality item intended for longer term use by a single person.
1k$ 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.
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.
It's not if you don't want to sacrifice quality, USA made is also a bonus. Kudos to JerryRigEverything.
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.
Just checked and there are $400 wheelchairs out there. How is a $1000 wheelchair an achievement?
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.
But the moment you go outside now you're dealing with ramps and hills.
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.
> 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.
That's a $500 wheelchair.
I know this is HN and people will likely look down on anyone riding a <$2000 bike, but come on.
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".
If you did, you probably wouldn't be particularly happy with a $200 bike.
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.
That’s me, I know nothing about wheelchairs, hence why I’m asking.
https://newmobility.com/the-ibot-is-back/
also I looked and a walmart wheelchair is $149. Wonder why it sucks.
[1] https://www.amazon.in/s?k=wheelchair&crid=22DWLE90LFB7O&spre...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.