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.