Getting Mobile – Milner Mobility

One’s personal mobility can be taken for granted, as when something happens and you can’t get around easily, it quickly becomes a problem. A ruptured Achilles recently had me immobile and so it was a good chance to check out the work of Milner Mobility. 

The company was founded in 1982, while its focus has been wholly on mobility for the past 12 years. Its main premises is in Mt Wellington, Auckland, where they have a large, easily accessible show room and workshop. As no customer need is ever the same, they have many solutions available, with well over 500 different products on offer. 

Speaking with GM, Darren Milner, he says his mother was in a wheelchair and passed away when he was young. “Most of the staff here have a connection to someone with a disability, so we like to raise the bar when it comes to mobility for New Zealanders.” 

They offer a total mobility solution, from bikes through to vans, “moving people around in whichever way possible is what we’re trying to do.”  

They offer everything from fitting hand controls to vehicles to designing and building custom fit outs for those in wheelchairs. When designing a mobility vehicle, Darren says their philosophy is to get people as far forward as they can. “We don’t want people feeling like they are cargo in the boot.” 

Milner can design and build vehicles here, including handling the structural modifications, though it comes to numbers and financial viability. “Doing anything structural is really expensive, but we try to do as much as is financially viable in New Zealand, to help the industry around us.” Where it’s more economical, they’ll import vans from Europe or Japan. Local support is also a factor. “Anything that we do to a vehicle is difficult without New Zealand-based support. These units are going to people who have a specific need, and supporting them properly is important.”  

Interestingly, there are different funding structures at play. If you have an accident and then require a mobility solution, generally, you’re under the ACC scheme and there are bigger budgets available. But if you fall into the sickness area, then the Ministry of Health budget is more restrictive. Therefore Milner has a range of vehicles to suit budgets. 

The Toyota Hiace and Noah Voxy are popular given they have a good mix of reliability and price, with mobility access that’s designed and built from the factory in Japan. “They still require certification and compliance, so we have to do quite a lot of modifications to them to suit New Zealand’s standards, which we do in-house here.” 

At the other end of the spectrum is the Mercedes Sprinter. “We can customise these to have the wheelchair in the back, or we can convert it so they can be seated upfront as a passenger or so they can drive. We can do all the structural mods to accommodate each and every need.” 

One of the more popular modifications they make to vehicles is fitting hand controls so that people without the use of their legs can get around. Hand controls can be fitted to just about any vehicle. They recently attached them to an RS 6 GT, and they’ve done a Ferrari in the past. Space is the main issue; there needs to be enough clearance between the steering wheel and the door.  

The move to electronic throttles means the car accelerates electronically through the hand control, though New Zealand law still requires a physical brake rod to run from the control down to the brake pedal. 

Driving with your hands sounds easy enough, but it requires a rewiring of your brain. We had the use of a Toyota Yaris, one of the vehicles from Milner’s rental fleet, that numbers some 150 and are available throughout the country. We had a lesson in a car park to get used to the action, followed by a road drive with a qualified instructor to make sure we had the knack of it. The hardest part is remembering to push down on the lever to brake. My brain kept wanting to rock the lever backward to slow, like pulling the hand brake, though that is actually how you accelerate. So it’s important not to get them mixed up. Pulling back to slow down seems more logical, like heaving on reins to slow the nags. You eventually get used to it however, and the action of the lever is easy to master, the acceleration easy to control. Working the steering with one hand via the spinner is perhaps harder to master, particularly as speed increases; you simply have better control with two hands on the wheel. And ensuring you get all indicating done while managing the throttle is another thing to master. But then it all becomes second nature, quite easy really. Milner can also offer secondary controls to help ease this, clumping functions for wipers, indicators, high beams etc on to a separate remote control, making it easier to operate in conjunction with the hand controls.  

Darren says while there aren’t accurate figures as to how many people in New Zealand live with some sort of physical disability, he says estimates put the number at close to four hundred thousand people. “So it’s a sector that is really important for New Zealand, and it’s important to do things properly. And that’s what we’re trying to do here.”