Unique Russian all-terrain wheelchair to be delivered to China

Caterwil wheelchair was created by the team of Ivan Nevzorov, NSTU NETI alumnus. Today, it is in demand both in Russia and abroad. At the end of October, Novosibirsk engineers signed a contract with Beijing free travel technology company, according to which the company from Beijing now sells Caterwil GTS wheelchairs in China, provides service and technical support for the consumers. The official manufacturer’s group at VKontakte hosts a video of the first Chinese customer testing a Caterwil wheelchair. Ivan Nevzorov, a graduate of Mechanics and Technology Faculty, NSTU NETI, and owner of Caterwil, is optimistic about the Chinese market. “In China, the situation with accessible environment is worse than in Russia. The most common is the absence of reduced height curb-cuts. And our "favourite" is a tree or a pillar opposite the ramp, or, for instance, the really steep ramp," Nevzorov explains. According to him, all-terrain wheelchairs from Hong Kong are now on the Chinese market. The Russian wheelchair, being of about the same price, can manage bigger hurdles. The Caterwil powered wheelchair is equipped with both wheeled and tracked platforms. A wheeled platform is used to move on a flat surface, whereas a tracked platform is used to overcome stairs, curbs and other obstacles. Tests show that the wheelchair can easily manage climbing steep stairs as well as any roads, even in winter conditions. “At the moment, the cost of the wheelchair is between 400 and 500 thousand rubles in Russia and starts from 1 million rubles abroad. Is it cheaper than making ramps and other devices for the disabled? I can’t say, but both have to be done. Even when a person uses our wheelchair, it is always easier to drive along the ramp than to climb or go down the stairs. Unfortunately, we cannot affect the quality of the ramps. But we can give people the means by which they will feel free in their environment, ” Ivan Nevzorov says. The all-terrain wheelchair is in demand not only in Asia, but also in the USA and in Europe: in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and other countries. A week ago, we sent a wheelchair to an elderly man from Italy. Living in a castle, he ordered our all-terrain wheelchair to make his moving around his property convenient”, Ivan shares. The wheelchair's ability to hurdle over extremely problematic urban environment remains the main competitive advantage of the development. A woman from Düsseldorf, who lives on the fourth floor without an elevator, has received the all-terrain wheelchair designed by Siberian engineers. For comparison, she was sent two wheelchairs: the Caterwil one and the chair by a rival company from Hong Kong. According to the authors of the development, the foreign wheelchair could not cope with 39 degrees angle of the stairs on the top floor, and Katya could (Katya is a popular Russian female name and a nickname for the development). For Caterwil, the limit is 40 degrees, so she safely helped the owner get to the apartment. Importantly, the price of the Russian and Hong Kong wheelchairs are approximately the same. At the beginning of 2019 during the winter experiment, the Caterwil all-terrain wheelchair showed that it can hurdle over stairwells and curbs, despite the height of the snow cover. In September 2018, a Novosibirsk engineer's all-terrain wheelchair won international wheelchair races in Düsseldorf. It won the “Hope for Technology” award in the category “Best Export Project in the Field of Rehabilitation”. In 2012, Ivan Nevzorov graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Technology, NSTU. In 2014, with his wife Galina, he founded a company to develop and manufacture innovative vehicles for wheelchair users. Ivan Nevzorov notes: “The idea of the project came to me when I was a student but then it was necessary to finish the academic work on the tribological machine ТТМ–001 (a device to check the durability of materials). Now I can say that the knowledge I gained at the university helped me to make my incredible ideas become reality.” Video of the wheelchair tests by the first customer from China Reference International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported that the Chinese economy has become the world's largest in terms of purchasing power. " Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have," The Business Insider explained the IMF's findings. “According to the IMF, by the end of 2014, China will make up 16.48% of the world's purchasing-power adjusted GDP (or $17.632 trillion), and the US will make up just 16.28% (or $17.416 trillion)"