The Track Chair Ripchair 3.0 has generated a lot of media buzz, ranging from the Discovery Channel to Fox Sports, and for good reason. It is a serious adaptive off-road vehicle for wheelchair users with options that can do a wide variety of work tasks.

The Ripchair 3.0 is manufactured by Howe and Howe Technologies, a company that specializes in extreme vehicles for use in military, police and firefighting work. Geoff Howe, CEO, explains that the Ripchair 3.0 was designed for wheelchair users with a focus on three goals — ease of transfer, ability to go anywhere and ruggedness.

The company eliminated the transfer issue altogether — the user stays in their own wheelchair, manual or power, and backs it into the Ripchair’s unique ramp design, which lifts and locks in place, providing 10 inches of ground clearance. Next, an overhead bar pulls down and locks the chair in place, becoming the front bumper. A four-stroke gasoline engine delivers 29 horsepower to the Ripchair’s 11-inch wide, aggressive rubber tracks that provide superior traction and a zero turn radius. The engine runs approximately eight hours on a five-gallon tank of gas.

A click through the videos on the company website shows that when it comes to adaptive off-road ability, the Ripchair 3.0 is in a league all its own. It has a top speed of 17 mph (set to a max of 10 mph at the factory), can handle marsh, sand, snow and mud; and it can go up, down and across slopes as steep as 60 percent (for safety and liability reasons the owner’s manual recommends avoiding slopes steeper than 20 percent).

In addition to facilitating outdoor exploration, the machine is a workhorse equipped with front and back trailer hitches that can tow up to 1,000 pounds. Many customers use it to tow lawn and field mowers; others attach a snowplow blade. Howe says the Ripchair can also run an excavator and frontend loader. He says he has a customer in Nebraska who uses a Ripchair to work his farm and two customers in California who use them to tend their vineyards.

One of the vineyard customers is Mark McCue, 58, in his 25th year as a C6-8 quadriplegic. “I use the Ripchair to tend the zinfandel grapes on my small vineyard as well as tow a mower on my hilly property in San Miguel” near Paso Robles, Calif., he says. “Before the Ripchair I used an ATV, which was really difficult to transfer onto and didn’t enable me to get up to the vines like I can in the Ripchair.”

The serious vehicle also comes with a serious price. The paraplegic version retails for $35,500 and the quadriplegic version, with a computer-controlled joystick, is $39,500. Howe explains that each Ripchair is 100 percent hand-crafted and takes six to eight weeks to build. He says the price is at a nonprofit “break even point” for the company. “These are high-quality machines engineered to be easily repairable by a local small engine repair shop or an automobile shop using off-the-shelf parts available anywhere in the United States,” he says.

Mike McLaughlin, 64, who has multiple sclerosis, got his Ripchair in July. “I’m an outdoor person,” he says, “and it is better than anything I can imagine.” Up until five years ago McLaughlin rode horses on his ten-acre property — half pasture and half woods — about a mile from the Platte River near Omaha, Neb. But his MS progressed to the point where he could no longer ride horses, so he started using a power chair. “Then I saw the Ripchair on the Internet and had to have one,” he says. “I can just drive into the Ripchair and go outdoors and explore my property, or visit my neighbors.”

Howe says that 20 customers have received a Ripchair since the first one was delivered last year. He adds that Ripchairs are completely customizable to meet specific needs or requests. “Our goal is to make kick-ass machines for adventurous people who want to get into the outdoors.”

Resources
• Rip Drive 3.0, trackchairextreme.com
• Howe and Howe Technologies, howeandhowe.com