Making an off-road vehicle accessible

EXDREAM is a system of products that lets people with lower-body paralysis drive side-by-side off-road vehicles.

Someone paralysed from the waist down spends most of the day confined to a wheelchair, which deepens the sense of disability and of lost mobility and freedom.

A Razor – a side-by-side off-road vehicle – is a machine with exceptional capability, both in where it can go and in how simple it is to drive. In one of these a driver can cross any terrain: beach sand, rock, mountain and more. It gives the driver an enormous sense of capability and freedom.

Today only a small number of Razors are adapted for disabled drivers, and even then it is done the same way it would be on an ordinary car. It hardly needs saying that the difference between a Razor and an ordinary car is vast, from which it follows that the adaptations being made today are not the right ones and do not answer the need properly.

This particular system comprises three products:

1. A new steering wheel with adapted throttle and brake.
2. A footplate that secures the driver’s legs with an electromagnet.
3. Adapted knee supports – to prevent chafing in the right places.

What the system includes

Genuinely adapting an off-road vehicle is not a matter of fitting a handle. A Razor drives differently from an ordinary car – it launches, it pitches, and it demands a constant grip. So what was developed here is a complete system rather than a single accessory: a new steering wheel, a control system that gives full command without using the legs, and a securing solution that holds the driver in the seat over rough ground.

Why this is a project for additive manufacturing

Every adaptation of this kind is by definition a run of one. No two drivers have the same measurements, the same ability and the same vehicle. MJF printing makes it possible to produce a part fitted to one person at the cost of a single unit, with no tooling at all – and that is what turns individual adaptation from an expensive engineering project into something that can actually be done.

A similar project of your own?

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