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A $1k Wheelchair

newmobility.com

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Re: A $1k Wheelchair

#371

Post by nothercastle »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #277
humbleferret wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious so looked at a few power wheelchairs...It's wild how expensive they are, especially considering the advancements in electric mobility tech elsewhere. You'd think they'd share some components with e-scooters, e-bikes, or even electric cars – motors, batteries, controllers. Are the powertrains and control systems in power wheelchairs really that specialised? Or is it another case of the medical device mar…

I suspect a major difference is that those e-scooters, bikes, cars, etc are produced and sold by the millions, whereas wheelchairs are small volume by comparison. Another commenter mentioned the legal requirements, which complicates things. That said, a quick google says there's 65-132 million wheelchair users worldwide so it's not a small market either.

Most of them are probably in countries where 1000 is a years wages.

Re: A $1k Wheelchair

#372

Post by astura »

hug wrote: post #347
astura wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This thread is bonkers >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.

I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, ten dollars? 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…

>It’s not often that the class divide on HN is so front and centre, but it is here.

It's an entire forum of people who have never experienced scarcity so they can't understand it.

Re: A $1k Wheelchair

#373

Post by roywiggins »

kkfx wrote: post #298
roywiggins wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing that a group of people who are generally the type to be sitting on $3000 ergonomic office chairs are insisting that $50 wheelchairs ought to be enough for anyone.

Well, I'm skeptic as I'm skeptic about 3k$ office chairs. Skeptic about the price, because well, research does have a price, but once you have profited to cover research fees you can't keep selling a not-anymore-new stuff at the same "pioneering phase" price. 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 ind…

Even Walmart doesn't sell bikes for less than like $200 and everyone agrees that they're pretty awful. $1000 for a bike that's essentially custom to your measurements (which is the whole point of these chairs!) and assembled in the US doesn't seem like a ripoff at all.

Re: A $1k Wheelchair

#374

Post by geodel »

fvdessen wrote: post #356
alistairSH wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but those bicycles don’t cost 100 bucks they probably cost 5000+. The last bicycle I bought was $7000 and that was midmarket (my recreational cyclist standards).

I was recently in Rwanda where seemingly half the goods of this very hilly country are transported by bicycle, and those are single speed old english style bikes with steel frame reinforced with rebar. (they carry hundred of kgs on the racks). The bike are run 8 hours a day for years and cost $100.

In India millions of women are walking miles to fetch few gallons of water everyday. I don't get why people in California are screaming water shortage. Should be possible for Americans to live on a gallon of water if hundred of millions live like that in India.

Re: A $1k Wheelchair

#375

Post by bluGill »

pbasista wrote: post #328
lynx23 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assistive technology costs are high because consumers barely have an alternative. I am blind. In Europe, a 40-cell braille display starts a 6k. 6k, just for a monitor which displays 40 characters . Prices are largely unchanged since 20 years. Technological advancements are irrelevant. Resellers will squeeze the cow, thats plain capitalism man.

If that is the case, then there seems to be a place in the market for someone else who can sell these devices for cheaper. 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 exces…

The problem is if you spend 100 million dollars to make one (which is about 30 engineers, 50 testers, and 20 other for a year) and sell 10,000 units (remember there is competition who will get come sales) you need $1000 each just to pay engineering costs. Lack of scale is what makes many products expensive.

Re: A $1k Wheelchair

#376

Post by amiga386 »

hug wrote: post #347
astura wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This thread is bonkers >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.

I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, ten dollars? 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…

You just linked to a $118 box of parts (or $217 if you want it assembled). This is an absolutely trash bike.

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.

Re: A $1k Wheelchair

#377

Post by roywiggins »

zxexz wrote: post #320
throwaway346434 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bicycles built for long duration use - people do ride for 16-24 hours straight more than you'd think do exist.

How many of them do that every day? And of those people that do, how much do you think they spend on their bikes?

And, when people do use cheap bikes that don't really fit them out of necessity long-term, what's the toll on their body? It's probably not zero!

Re: A $1k Wheelchair

#378

Post by rtkwe »

sandworm101 wrote: post #327
rtkwe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is enclosed. They show a picture later and there's a green safety window to view the work piece in the machine, that material will be designed to block whatever wavelength of light the laser is using (most likely IR, and what do you know safety glasses for the IR bands are mostly green).

No. Such materials are designed to let through all but the narrow wavelengths expected of the laser. And some IR "shields" actually reflect IR light rather than absorb it. A proper laser shield should not be engineered to do the minimum necessary. Metal works. Wood works. Even blackout curtains bought at walmart can work.

Properly rated safety shields can absolutely be transparent and properly block the necessary wavelengths. The color comes from the wavelengths they're blocking. Weird stance to take that the entire industry is wrong about laser safety.

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..

Re: A $1k Wheelchair

#379

Post by oremolten »

astura wrote: post #344
hug wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is bonkers. I'm not even American and it took me all of two minutes to find a bike for $118 USD (or about 90 GBP) available from Walmart. Here it is: https://www.walmart.com/ip/1121295 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…

>This thread is bonkers >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.

so out of touch you're using an example of a bike purchase from 6 years ago :^) did she also replace the tires 3 or 4 times? because no way any bike tire is taking 19,000 miles of road use no matter the brand. The average price of a new bike more than doubled from 2015 to 2024.

Re: A $1k Wheelchair

#380

Post by DrammBA »

eru wrote: post #304
giorgioz wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also economy of scale, there are 1 billion bikes in the world VS 65 million wheelchairs.

Interesting, only 1 billion bicycles? I would have expected more than that. In most of the places I lived (Europe, Asia) there seems to be more than one beater bike per person lying around somewhere (and some nice bikes, too, but much fewer).

I'm actually surprised it's 1 billion, when you remove children, elderly, people simply out of shape for a bike, people unable to afford a bike no matter how cheap, people with disabilities incompatible with bikes, that billion is like 75%+ coverage of TAM.
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