A wheelchair user gets a bespoke Rimac Battery system and a whole new lease on life.
TAKE A MOMENT TO watch this video of Rimac Automobili fit one of its supercar battery systems into a wheelchair to improve the user’s quality of life – a truly heartwarming story.
While most people might recognise the name Rimac Automobili for its electric Concept_One supercar, we suspect it’s about to become a whole lot better known for this one generous act. Mate Rimac, founder and CEO said: “Rolly Bugnar, a young and extremely bright young man, contacted us to help him improve his wheelchair. Since we have already used the technology originally developed for the Concept_One supercar in other products like the high-performance Greyp Bikes, we were confident that we could relatively quickly adapt our battery for a wheelchair.
“All our systems are designed with modularity in mind. We have chosen to take the Greyp G12 battery system, Battery Management System (BMS), Vehicle Control Unit (VCU) and Human Machine Interface (HMI) as the base for this project. It still took us months of development and adaptation, but we are all very satisfied with the performance and reliability of the prototype system.”
According to Rimac, the new battery system drastically increases the range, reduces weight, improves overall performance and drastically reduces the environmental impact of battery-powered wheelchairs. For instance, Bugnar’s original chair was limited to 10km on a single charge and now it can travel up to 60km; the weight of his chair’s old battery was 31.7kg, it’s now 21.7kg and the projected lifetime has been multiplied by 10. The old battery needed to be replaced every year, but Rimac says its battery will last 10 years without any loss of capacity.
“We are already quite diversified, entering the wheelchair market would be an entirely different field for us and. Before any steps towards commercialization, we will have to do further studies,” Rimac said.
