Car Safety for People with Disabilities

The safest way to travel in a vehicle is seated in the car seat using a seat belt. A Swivel Seat is a solution that enables wheelchair users to do this.

The Luxonomist. 09/07/2015

Seat 1 — Turny Evo in combination with a Recaro seat in an adapted Mercedes-Benz. (Photo: autoadapt.com)

Autoadapt, Swedish manufacturer of vehicle adaptation solutions, now introduces a new version of their Turny Evo. The first of two new swivel seats from Autoadapt to hit the market this year.

The key feature of the Turny Evo, helping both drivers and passengers to get seated, remains the same with some major improvements in comfort, ease of use, installation and, most important, safety.

Peter Wahlsten, Executive Vice President at Autoadapt explains why: “We firmly believe that everyone should be entitled to the same safety, but when you travel in a vehicle seated in a wheelchair you have already accepted a lower degree of safety. Without proper head and neck support it is practically as bad as not wearing a seat belt at all.”

All Autoadapt swivel seats are crash tested and approved according to the same standards that applies to the automotive industry, a 20 G crash with a 76 kg crash test dummy. With the new Turny Evo and the coming Turny Low Vehicle, the company pushes beyond the standard with successful crash tests at 30 G with a 102 kg crash test dummy.

Seat 2 — The Turny Evo in combination with the Carony system. (Photo: autoadapt.com)

A seat lift is a swivel seat variant in which the entire seat comes out of the vehicle and lowers to a suitable height for the user. Swivel seats can be manually operated, mechanical or advanced devices, programmable to suit a specific user and vehicle.

Seat 3 — A «bare» Turny Evo unit. (Photo: autoadapt.com)

A car seat and a wheelchair are two very different things. The car seat is designed to make travel in a static position comfortable, but doesn’t need to take weight and other factors into account. For a seat belt to be effective there has to be proper belt geometry. This is much easier to achieve if the user is placed in a car seat as the vehicle’s designers intended.

Seat 4 — The components of the Turny Evo being inspected before assembly at the Autoadapt manufacturing plant in Stenkullen, Sweden. (Photo: autoadapt.com)

Perhaps a more emotional reason is the choice of vehicle type and model. Lowered floor adaptations demand a lot of interior space while a swivel seat fits in practically all mass produced cars. Additionally, swivel seat adaptations can be installed using the existing seat hole pattern and can be fully restored in the event of a sale.