VCBurner said:
Hey Goose,
The Renegade looks and sounds like one heck of a product.
It is just as impressive "live"... Very shortly after I got here, the guy that makes them showed up with a couple of demo units. I got a chance to give one a very limited try in the corridors and around the gym. It was an interesting machine, and I can see a lot of use for it as a part time use chair for outside and other difficult enviornments. However it is not at all suitable for a "Daily driver" inside use chair, for many of the same reasons that make it so good outdoors (and this was the opinion of the inventor as well, not just my thinking...)
It is ruggedly built, which translates to HEAVY, and weight is something that on always wants to avoid in a chair if possible - your arms and shoulders have to do what your legs used to, and they really aren't up to the strains involved, and every ounce makes it worse.
The chair is bigger than normal - longer wheel base, increased wheel camber, etc. The bigger the chair, the bigger the turning radius and the harder it is to manuever in...
The knobby tires and transmission allow it to be geared down to go over obstacles, but increase the rolling resistance on smooth surfaces....
So it pretty much has to be a second chair, and as such the ins. co. isn't going to pay for it - and it isn't cheap, even as chairs go. According to one catalog I've been looking at, typical good to upper quality chairs run $1,500-3,000 or more, and the Renegade is at the upper end of that range... (Thanks largely to gov't regulations on "medical devices", and gov't / insurance co. payment policies that have the effect of setting a "price floor" on them) BTW that price is for "manual" chairs - power chairs start around $10K and go up a lot from there.... This is one reason why I'm sure they have me in a manual chair and haven't even talked power chairs at all, but they have no hesitation to put people that need them under power...
So the Renegade is fairly far down on the shopping list, not to mention that I'm wanting to learn a lot more about what other options might be available out there....
Gooserider