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Disabled Cars & Vehicles | How They’re Made
Disabled vehicles and disabled vehicle adaptations have a huge part to play in helping people live with a disability. Owning your own disabled car can make a huge difference to your personal freedom and independence. At Allied Mobility, we specialise in the design and manufacture of disabled vehicles – from compact disabled cars to larger disabled vans – all of which are fully wheelchair accessible.
Here, we take a closer look at how our disabled cars and vehicles are designed and built to maximise accessibility, safety and comfort.
Disabled Cars – Designed Around You
As far as disabled vehicles for sale are concerned, one size certainly doesn’t fit all. That’s why Allied Mobility™ is firmly committed to offering a varied selection of high-quality disabled vehicles that gives real choice, according to your particular disability and family circumstances. That’s why ongoing feedback from users of our disabled vehicles is so important to our continuous research and development programme.
We gain valuable insights into the key things our wheelchair users – and their families and carers – value most, through a variety of means. These include:
Focus Groups
Focus group research with customers. This helps us get a deeper understanding of the practical needs and challenges, likes and dislikes, of disability car users.
Gathering feedback
Gathering feedback from our nationwide team of mobility consultants and distribution partners, including in Ireland. Together, they meet more than 5,000 potential disability vehicles customers each year, on a one-to-one basis, so they have a huge wealth of customer insights to share!
Statistic Analysis
Analysing government statistics relating to demand for different types of vehicles for disabled people. This helps us assess new types of disabled vehicle to develop.
Gathering information
Gathering information from our mobile support technicians, who have first-hand experience of maintaining and repairing our disability cars. This helps us improve reliability and design disabled vehicles which are built to last.
Ensuring Your Safety & Security
Above all, you’ll want to know that your new disabled car is safe and secure for everyone travelling in it. Usually, making disabled vehicles for sale involves converting the vehicle to provide more headroom, by lowering the main floor of the vehicle.
As the leading disabled car supplier in the Europe, including Ireland, we take your safety and security very seriously. This means that we need to ensure that every adaptation we make to your disabled car is carefully designed to be practical, robust and, above all, safe and secure, for disabled passengers and companions alike. To ensure this is the case, our disabled car designs all undergo rigorous, independent safety testing, to ensure they meet stringent national and/or international safety standards.
Safety Tests & Inspections
All of our disabled cars and vans are certified to show that they meet the highest possible automotive standards.
- EC Whole Vehicle Type Approval.
- Individual Vehicle Approval – Ireland
- PAS 2012*
Just some of the safety tests and inspections carried out on our disability vehicles include:
- Wheelchair restraints – dynamic crash test.
- Wheelchair access ramp – simulated crash test; safe working load validation.
- Torsion test – to ensure that vehicle strength is maintained.
- Assist winch – line pull test.
- Noise level tests.
- Fuel tank – multiple crash, permeability, pressure, fire, temperature and overturn tests.
- Brakes – stopping distance and lane change tests.
- Seating – dynamic crash tests (forward and backward).
- ISOFIX points – tests, for securing baby carriers and child seats.
*PAS 2012 – The leading standard for design and construction of wheelchair accessible vehicles.
Europe’s Largest Disability Vehicle Manufacturing Plant
All Allied Mobility™ disabled vehicles are converted at our main, 12-hectare manufacturing centre. Managed by our highly professional production team, this is the largest and most advanced disability vehicle factory in Europe.
Every disability vehicle designed and manufactured by Allied is carefully constructed to meet the specific requirements of each customer order, including your preferred model, seating layout and any optional extras.
Watch our video to see how our WAV’s are made.
Key stages of manufacturing a disable vehicle
- Making components, including lowered floors and access ramps, in our pre-production facility.
- Stripping out components from the standard or base vehicle. Some of these, such as fuel tanks and rear floor sections, will be replaced with adapted parts. Others, such as exhausts, will be modified. Still others, such as wheels, certain seats and cosmetic trims, will be reinstalled, once the main conversion is complete.
- Vehicle conversion, in one of our main, straight-line assembly halls.
- Fitting any additional disabled vehicle adaptations you may have requested.
- A detailed, 102-point quality control inspection.
