Desirable features for all terrain electric wheelchair.

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Culannh

Hi everybody. We are a group of masters engineering students with a task to design an all terrain wheelchair. We are looking for some feedback regarding the features of this type of product and what is most important to the user. As part of our project, there are some basic requirements in which we must meet and are as follows:

• The wheelchair must be foldable or collapsible.
• The wheelchair must fit into the boot of an estate car. 

Any help on this matter will be greatly appreciated and we look forward to hearing your answers. 

forgoodnesssake

Interesting.  I am guessing you are talking about manual (ie non powered) chairs and if so my knowledge is limited...but one consideration is definitely big rugged tyres and some way for the person to self propel without getting their hands filthy! 

If you are interested in power chairs too (even just for comparison) my son has a Magic Mobility Frontier V6 hybrid all terrain power chair (he can't self propel and now very heavy and awkward to push in an adult al terrain manual chair, even though he only weighs 50kg).  So it has "town tyres" and fatter all terrain ones.  It is a pretty good chair as it is very manoevrable indoors also (which he needs as we can't afford 2 power chairs!)  So it is a bit of a compromise but  still does pretty well on rough ground.  Clearance is still a bit of an issue..it's about 6cm, which isn't much if you come across a big stone on a Lakeland path!  However there are obvious stability issues if centre of gravity is too high.

Being able to fold it is not a consideration (impossible) and also getting it into the boot of an estate car: we have a Caddy WAV with a ramp. 

There are things like Trampers which are all terrain scooters but they are huge and also being handlebar controlled (like a quad bike) they are no good for someone like my son with poor hand function due to CP so he needs to use joystick control.

As much "splash proofing" as possible is good as well as very resiliant paintwork!