With spring around the corner, it’s time to start considering leaving your winterly cocoon and enjoy the warm sun and fresh air. It’s an unfortunate reality that some people suffer from health conditions precluding them from enjoying the warm weather during a lovely stroll at the park, or at the mall. If one can’t walk for very long, a mobility scooter is an excellent tool to bring back your freedom to go outside.
Mobility scooters are wonderful vehicules, available in a myriad of sizes to fit as many particular needs, all distinct from one another. From this, it might seem difficult to parsoose through the many choices offered to us. As you will soon see, there is a single attribute that influences your choice : Size. It denotes it’s use, it’s range, the places it can be driven in, and it’s price.
Key takeaways
- Where you’ll ride: a power chair or small folding scooter indoors, a large scooter for outdoor outings, a mid-size model for both.
- Maintenance: larger models need tire pressure checks, charging after every outing and a storage space.
- Price: about $3,000 for a small model, $5,000 for a mid-size and over $7,000 for a luxury model.
- The 80-20 rule: choose the vehicle suited to what you’ll do 80% of the time.
Where Can I Drive my Scooter ?
Each model of mobility scooter is designed to be used in a specific context. For indoor use, electric wheelchairs and small scooters are ideal. For outdoor use, we mostly recommend bigger scooters, which have a more comfortable seat and suspension, as well as bigger batteries providing greater range.
Electric wheelchairs are motorized seats designed to be agile and fit through cramped spaces, such as inside an apartment. It shares many of it’s uses with a manual wheelchair, and in some ways serves to replace the legs of it’s user. Small scooters are often foldable, or can be easily disassembled, making them handily carried inside a car. As such, they can be very useful when going to the mall or inside large buildings.
Big scooters are designed to provide the best range and comfort for the rider when going on outdoor strolls. With their bigger wheels, better suspension and seating, these scooters are ideal to go around parks and on bike lanes or trails.
For those hoping to use their scooters both inside and out, some intermediate-sized scooters are available. These scooters are a compromise between the other two categories. They are neither foldable nor can they be disassembled, but they are compact enough to be safely driven indoors. They don’t have the range, nor the comfort of bigger, more luxurious scooters, but they still have adequately sized batteries and suspensions to bring you some autonomy and comfort when driving on sidewalks.
How Do I Maintain my Scooter ?
The size of your scooter will dramatically influence the amount of maintenance you will need to provide to it. Smaller scooters usually have solid puncture-proof tires, and the battery packs are generally detachable, making recharging them easy. Furthermore, it’s small size usually means you’ll be able to store it inside your home without cluttering up the space too much.
Bigger scooters need greater care. Such vehicles are often fitted with pneumatic tires. Those need to be reinflated often, otherwise they will wear out faster, putting you at risk of flats. The batteries need to be fully recharged at every use. Even with a greater range, leaving batteries without a full charge will wear them down faster, reducing their lifetime and efficiency. Furthermore, the large size of such scooters mean they need an adequate storage room, or properly equipped shed.
How Much do Mobility Scooter Cost ?
If you intend to buy a mobility scooter, keep in mind that the size of a scooter has a significant impact on it’s cost. With exception of electric wheelchairs, which have their own pricing scale based on their options, the bigger a scooter is, the more luxurious and costly it will be.
Generally, you can find a small-sized scooter for around three thousand dollars, including batteries and necessary accessories. An intermediate-sized scooter, capable of a range of at least 25 km, starts at around five thousand dollars. Finally, bigger scooters capable of the greatest of comfort and longest of rides can reach prices of over seven thousand dollars.
How to Choose ?
To choose the right scooter, you have to evaluate your particular needs, as well as your means. Here, at Équipements Adaptés MCL, we suggest that you consider what we call the “80-20 Rule“. Think of the usage you will need of a scooter 80 % of the time, and pick the right scooter for that use. The other 20 %, the scooter will be less handy, but this compromise will save you from having to buy a second vehicle.
In any case, it would be our pleasure to guide you through your search. Don’t hesitate to peroose the fact sheets of the scooters we have to offer, and to contact one of our specialists to learn more about the scooter that best fits your needs.
Find Mobility, Confort and Liberty !
