alt Hacker News>The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike
Only because bikes are made up of commodity parts from many suppliers which drive the costs down, whereas this is mostly bespoke.
It is hilarious that people keep throwing out prices of $200 or $500, when $200 might get you close to the cost of one of the wheels on this.
>IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product
Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are.
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Looks like very little bespoke parts - the front pork pieces, that's some worker feeding pipe stock to an expensive machine after punching a few numbers for $10 an hour. The wheels are commodity, can't imagine the BOM for something like this is >$200. Competitors are other western companies charging even more exorbitant prices, they managed to charge less which is great. But that doesn't mean the cost is not still overall absurd for what you get. Maybe reasonable American manufacturing prices, sure, it's a good value product. I'm not familiar with the machine, but I've priced out bending aluminum pipes for various architecture details and fitness equipment and per piece price is peanuts in Asia compared to fabricating in NA.
> Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are.
I think that's what people are missing.
His competition is $5k wheelchairs that are often pictured with another $10k + of customizations.
I don't think that most people realize that $5k wheelchairs don't come with so much as a seat cushion as standard.