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I have no knowledge of this specific product area but wondering what aspect of the wheelchair in the photo results in this seemingly high cost? (to note, I unde

by changing1999 2y ago

I have no knowledge of this specific product area but wondering what aspect of the wheelchair in the photo results in this seemingly high cost? (to note, I understand that this is still far cheaper than other wheelchairs). Is it the material cost? It looks like it's just a few pipes, a cushion, and a pair of wheels. About the same build as a basic bicycle.

paulddraper 2y ago
First, have you purchased a bicycle? "High quality" bicycles start at $1,000. (quality dimensions = weight, comfort, durability, flexibility) 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.
- changing1999 2y ago
  I've only ever owned fairly cheap commuter bikes like Specialized. But even then, the quality and the comfort were OK. I guess in this case, small scale and configurability makes the biggest difference in wheelchairs vs bikes.
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    Wheelchair users spend their entire waking lives using wheelchairs, more or less. 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?
bluGill 2y ago
Mostly the machines the factory uses. You can cut tubes by hand and drill those holes, but the machines are more accurate and faster. However those machines will cost you in the million range each in some cases. (the $1000 Chinese versions for home use are kits that will cost you $10k to make accurate and the quality means they will wear out fast so while find for building a couple they are more expensive than the million dollar machines in the long run) That investment needs to be amortized across whatever you build and wheelchairs are not high volume. 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)
- changing1999 2y ago
  Fascinating. I assumed that most manufacturing machines can be reconfigured to build anything that machine can handle physically (i.e. not a particularly specialized machine) and, therefore, can be bought for cheap, or used. Coming from software I don't have a frame of reference for manufacturing cost.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Reconfiguerable is common but high cost. most jigs are custom made one offs at high cost. every bit of flexibility will cost you tens of thousands at minimun and millions on the high end. The parts are at most $100, it the engineering and skilled machinist time that adds up.
rtkwe 2y ago
It's a relatively small market so the up front capital and ongoing labor costs are probably pretty restrictive. Those parts are more expensive than you realize though with the wheels being the most expensive part if I had to wager, they're critical, specialized, and need to stand up to a lot of abuse.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I toured the Trek factory when they still made them in the US. They'd already drunk from the font of Goldratt wrt to Just in Time, but they would set up each day pretty much to make one model of bicycle for the whole day. Parts, tooling, paint booth, everything. The only thing that changed was sizes, and a model of bike tends to have the same geometries across all sizes. 78º angle here, 99º angle there. That may not be optimal for the rider but it's how you keep prices down and keep product lines from getting confusing. 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.
  - rtkwe 2y ago
    The bend angle of the tube that forms the seat support down to the legs seems like one of their major adjustment points for comfort and efficiency so I don't think you could have a similar setup. These are essentially semi-custom not a simple size based product like a bike. The extra adjustments are important because the users are in them many more hours a day so small problems can cause long term issues. 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 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.
srockets 2y ago
You also lacks knowledge of bikes: a bike built from similar materials, at a similar quality of craftsmanship and weight would cost you north of $5k.

paulddraper 2y ago

First, have you purchased a bicycle? "High quality" bicycles start at $1,000. (quality dimensions = weight, comfort, durability, flexibility) 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.

changing1999 2y ago
I've only ever owned fairly cheap commuter bikes like Specialized. But even then, the quality and the comfort were OK. I guess in this case, small scale and configurability makes the biggest difference in wheelchairs vs bikes.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  Wheelchair users spend their entire waking lives using wheelchairs, more or less. 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?

bluGill 2y ago

Mostly the machines the factory uses. You can cut tubes by hand and drill those holes, but the machines are more accurate and faster. However those machines will cost you in the million range each in some cases. (the $1000 Chinese versions for home use are kits that will cost you $10k to make accurate and the quality means they will wear out fast so while find for building a couple they are more expensive than the million dollar machines in the long run) That investment needs to be amortized across whatever you build and wheelchairs are not high volume. 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)

changing1999 2y ago
Fascinating. I assumed that most manufacturing machines can be reconfigured to build anything that machine can handle physically (i.e. not a particularly specialized machine) and, therefore, can be bought for cheap, or used. Coming from software I don't have a frame of reference for manufacturing cost.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Reconfiguerable is common but high cost. most jigs are custom made one offs at high cost. every bit of flexibility will cost you tens of thousands at minimun and millions on the high end. The parts are at most $100, it the engineering and skilled machinist time that adds up.

rtkwe 2y ago

It's a relatively small market so the up front capital and ongoing labor costs are probably pretty restrictive. Those parts are more expensive than you realize though with the wheels being the most expensive part if I had to wager, they're critical, specialized, and need to stand up to a lot of abuse.

hinkley 2y ago
I toured the Trek factory when they still made them in the US. They'd already drunk from the font of Goldratt wrt to Just in Time, but they would set up each day pretty much to make one model of bicycle for the whole day. Parts, tooling, paint booth, everything. The only thing that changed was sizes, and a model of bike tends to have the same geometries across all sizes. 78º angle here, 99º angle there. That may not be optimal for the rider but it's how you keep prices down and keep product lines from getting confusing. 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.
- rtkwe 2y ago
  The bend angle of the tube that forms the seat support down to the legs seems like one of their major adjustment points for comfort and efficiency so I don't think you could have a similar setup. These are essentially semi-custom not a simple size based product like a bike. The extra adjustments are important because the users are in them many more hours a day so small problems can cause long term issues. 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 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.

srockets 2y ago

You also lacks knowledge of bikes: a bike built from similar materials, at a similar quality of craftsmanship and weight would cost you north of $5k.