Off Road Powerchair

Seriously, how did I miss this? I feel such a fool blogging about someone who has stuck a few bits of tin foil to his scooter when this fellow is out there.



The Tank Chair, as it unsuprisingly called, was concieved and built by Brian Soden of Phoenix after a car accident left his wife Liz paraplegic. Great lovers of the out doors, the Soden's found that traditional off road wheelchairs were just not up to the job when faced with the rugged Arizona landscape. The Tank Chair is a real monster, it can handle rocky trails; snow; and even the steepest of inclines.

Brian is now offering tank chairs to consumers. While in many cases the final product will be customised to fit the needs and wants of each individual consumer, he also offers two standard models - if these can ever be described as standard. The standard tank chair is fitted with rubber tracks and the more conventional Speedster is fitted with a pair of beautiful 21 inch alloy wheels.

Visit http://www.tankchair.com/ for more details

TGA Breeze: The Roll Royce of Scooters

Now I have often said the TGA Breeze is the Rolls Royce of scooters, and it seems I'm not alone. Retired engineer Bill Inston of Worle in Somerset has spent the last three months converting his second hand Breeze 4 into a facsimile of a Rolls Royce Silver cloud. Working with such diverse materials as tin foil, mahogany and knitting needles Mr Inston has created a scooter the envy of all on Weston Supermare.

He said: "My Rolls-Royce is the only one of its kind in the world.

"Like everyone else, I always wanted a Rolls and like many others, I could never afford one. So one day I had the idea to turn my scooter into one. When I'm cruising through Weston people often stop me and ask about it."

With a mahogany dash, perspex roof, and a distinctive dancing cherub in place of the flying lady it is no wonder he is caussing a bit of a stir.

Daily Express

On thing about this story that doesn't ring true though - where on earth did he manage to pick up a Breeze 4 for only £200!

A Week in Mobility Scooters

A quick round up of what's going on web wise in the world of mobility scooters.

Ill Informed Moaning

As ever the world wide web is a hot bed of people whinging about scooters, first up The Daily Gripe with a moan about reckless drivers. The article is pretty tame; the usual stuff about how it would be better if people were more considerate, but as usual the comments display typical ignorance of the difference between the classes of scooter and the laws that apply. There is nothing wrong with being ignorant of these things, but if you are PLEASE don't start spouting off on a public forum, it just makes you look silly...

An article in the Yorkshire Star might conjure up some sympathy one would think, but no apparently not. A pick of the comments include:
"she will know how the young child feels like who was run down last week by an OAP on a scooter there are not safe for OAP or CHILD"
"I bet she was on the road without her lights on."
I dread to think what was in the posts that were removed by the moderator!

New Products

MNFSA have a good review of the new scooter in the NHC Freerider range, the Freerider Aviator. The Aviator is an eight mile an hour scooter from Heartway that looks set be a bit of a hit.

On HubPages there is another review, this time of the Pride Colt XL8 . The XL8 is the new top of the range of the Colt family and apparently they are flying out the door at the Pride dealers. The versitility and sporty styling is clearly striking a chord with the buying public.

And Finally...

A woman in New Zeland is still witing for an apology from McDonald's after the restaurant refused to serve her at the drive through window as she was on a mobility scooter. The woman claims that she was unable to get her scooter through the doors and was forced to use the drive through window. McDonald's have apparently invited her to discuss the matter but she claims that on the two occasions she has visited the restaurant the have claimed to be too busy to talk.

Mobility Scooter Price Match

Now a lot of people who try to buy their first scooter are surprised by several things. The first is the recommended retail price of most mobility scooters. In many cases the RRP of an 8mph mobility scooter could be as much as a small car, around six or seven thousand pounds. The second surprise will be the wild variations in listed prices on some models. Some dealers (less so on the Internet) will NEVER volunteer to discount a product, offer all products at or around the RRP; other dealers however will discount hard, sometimes as much as sixty or seventy percent of the manufacturers recommended price. The third surprise is that some dealers will never list a price at all.

For the new consumer of mobility products this seems bizarre and in many ways they are right. Ultimately what drives this strangeness are two things, the manufacturers and the large retailers. Traditionally mobility scooters were sold in one of two ways (if we exclude the Mobility scheme from this discussion), either from shop fronts or by direct marketing. Mobility scooters have always been a low volume product and in order to maintain either expensive property or an expensive sales force it was necessary to make a very large mark up on each unit. In order to get ahead companies would invest in larger properties and more staff in order make sales.

Since the advent of the internet this has all changed, now smaller family run businesses are able to take advantage of their low overheads and sell products online at greatly reduced margins. The way to get ahead now for these businesses is to invest in stock and increase volume.

This has not been met with joy buy the large established dealers and to finally get to the point, this is what is happening in the market place: in order to maintain market share large dealers put pressure on the manufacturers to keep the prices inflated, the manufacturers put pressure on the small dealers to stop advertising low prices, and in this way the large dealers hope to maintain the status quo for a few more years.

Unfortunately for the big dealers the online dealers are getting smarter, some even offering instant mobility scooter price match services that will send you a price beating quote in seconds at the click of a button. The future looks bright for mobility consumers.

TGA Breeze and Pride Colt Price Match

Value Mobility have launched an online price matching service on some of their most popular scooters. For so many consumers the process of finding the best price has involved tedious rounds of searching the web and making phone call just to find the best priced mobility scooter. The Value Mobility price match service should go some way to removing that headache. Instead of having to call in, or fill out a long form all you have to do is type in your email address and the best price you have been quoted, and the price matching agents will do the rest, often responding within a matter of minutes. While the price matching service isn't available on all scooter it is currently available on the following:

• TGA Breeze 3 and 4
  
• Freerider Royale
• TGA Supersport
• Pride Colt XL8 and Colt Deluxe
• Electric Mobility 3,4,6 and 8
  

TGA Vita Continued...

Apart from their shared heritiage and modernist styling the TGA Vita and Freerider Royale 4 are quite different beasts (yes I know I was comparing them in the last post!). The Royale 4 is a true heavyweight mobility scooter weighing over 100lbs more (batteries included) than the Vita . The Royale is also six inches longer and an inch and a half wider than its smaller cousin. Perhaps it is a little surprising that the TGA Vita actually claims a higher maximum rider weight of 400lbs to the Royale's 350lbs, but it is less surprising that the Vita with its slimline form requires a lot less juice coming stock with 2 x 50 Ah batteries whereas the Royale requires 2 x 80 Ah. The Vita also has a less powerful motor - 700 watts versus 1,300 watts in the Royale - but this doesn't seem to affect the pick up on the machine as it felt very lively during our quick test.

Ride comfort in both machines is provided by fully active suspension, all wheel on the Royale and front wheels and single post on te TGA Vita. Both have oversized pneumatic tyres front and rear, although again the Royale as befits it's greater size adds an inch or so on both front and rear tyres.

I think I am going to have to change my initial assessment on the TGA Vita: I still love it, but I'm not sure it is the Royale killer I assumed at first look. The difference finally is about power. If you are looking for a mobility scooter to power up steep gradients on or off road you may find that the Royale is still the best scooter for you, but if you are looking for something that can do a bit of everything and is above all fun then I think you should seriously consider the TGA Vita.

TGA Vita: a First Look

TGA have been promising a new luxury 8 mph scooter since the beginning of the summer but all I had seen was a few teaser pics on their web site and other than that nothing. I was starting to think it was all an elaborate fantasy. But today at long last I got my hands on the new TGA Vita!

I'm going to put my cards on the table: it was love at frst sight. Up till now I thought nothing could touch the Freerider Royale when it came to styling, but this beats it hands down. Both scooter have clearly based their shape on modern mopeds but While the Royale was supremely elegant in its three wheel incarnation, the four wheel model appears to be a bit of a fudge.This is not the case for the TGA Vita, it was clearly designed as a four wheel scooter and as yet there appears to be no plans to make a three wheel version.

It may come as no surprise to discover that this mobility scooter is manufactured by Heartway Mobility, the same company that build the Royale, although it does beg a couple of questions: first, why didn't it get picked up as part of the Freerider range? And second, why have they manufactured something that is so clearly aimed at the Royale's target market (the RRP of the Vita will £3,995, easily within the same price band)? While these questions are interesting to scooter nerd they are irrelevant to the average consumer, who can only benefit from the competition of two companies offering such high quality mobility scooters.

Tomorrow I will put up some more pictures and go into some more of the technical details that make this scooter so special, but for now you can check out TGA Vita specifications at Value Mobility.