The privilege of driving is easy to take for granted. But it's something you don't really appreciate until you wake up one morning and find you can't do it anymore.
More and more people are finding themselves in that position, from disabled veterans returning from war to aging baby boomers.
Twenty-three years ago, complications from a football accident put Mo Abusham in a wheelchair. Something like that could easily overwhelm many people, but Abusham has made the most of it. He now owns a company called Better Life Mobility, which sells and services products for people who use wheelchairs. These include hand-controlled minivans made by a Phoenix company called Vantage Mobility International. To show off its star product, Abusham drove up in his own personal VMI-converted Honda Odyssey, and after some basic instruction, he let us have a go at driving it.
The basic technology to convert a vehicle to hand controls has been around a long time, Abusham said. It's just two rods connected to a single one-in-the-tree lever on the left side of the steering column. You push it down for braking and pull it toward you to accelerate. Very simple.
But making the vehicle start and stop with hand controls is just one of the things that go into a VMI conversion. VMI takes the interior apart, lowers the floor to make it easier for a wheelchair to come up and then changes the rear suspension to accommodate the lowered floor. The rear suspensions of VMI-converted Odyssey minivans are from Honda Pilots, and a jackscrew in the right rear corner lowers the van further to accommodate the wheelchair ramp. The lower the angle on the ramp, the easier it is to roll a wheelchair into the van.
To get a more realistic feel for it, I tried the whole test drive from a wheelchair, starting from outside the van.
First, you open the sliding side door using the stock Honda key fob. Once the door is open wide enough, the ramp automatically deploys.
VMI offers a setup in which the front passenger's seat comes out and can be wheeled away to make room for a wheelchair. That space can then be used either as a passenger's seating spot if the wheelchair user is not going to drive or as a spot from which to transfer from the wheelchair into the driver's seat. The latter is how I got in.
From there, it's easy. You start the car as you normally would, except that you're holding the brake with the hand lever instead of your foot, although the foot pedals are still in place and fully operable. Then pull up the lever to let off the brake, pull it back to ease on the gas, and voilà, you're rolling. I found the accelerator pedal to be touchier than the brake pedal, but that's just how Honda made it.
There is a “necker's knob” on the steering wheel for better steering control, since one of your hands is always on the gas-and-brake lever. By simultaneously holding the lever down and pulling it back, you can even brake-torque the van if you need to drag-race. It's simple enough, but getting used to it takes some practice.
When he first started driving these, Abusham said, “the first thing I wanted to do was have my leg do the driving motion, because that's what you're most used to doing. It's just kind of an interesting concept to actually have to use your hand to accelerate and brake.”
The converted minivan I drove cost about $25,000. So the whole thing, counting the cost of the van, can run $50,000 or more. But it's worth it.
“It's major independence,” Abusham said of his and his customers' vans. “You get your self-confidence back. Just the ability to do things on your own--those are the things we appreciate about the vans.”
