• halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    It’s not necessarily about usefulness but rather quantity and economics of scale.

    The number of people needing wheelchairs in the first place is pretty small compared to the population, and adding the additional caveat of those that can still use their legs fully to power what is effectively a bicycle, results in a venn diagram with an extremely tiny use case.

    The cost of a decent basic wheelchair (not AliExpress/Walmart shit) is already high. Adding the complexity of a bicycle on top of that just makes it more expensive. And then there’s insurance which almost certainly would tell you to kick rocks before they would even think of covering a fraction of the cost because it isn’t necessary.