Hi all,
My husband is missing his left arm and his right is significantly shortened with a limited hand and two fingers. He’d really like to learn to drive and as he doesn’t qualify for motability, we’re self funding. We’re really struggling with adaption companies and we’d welcome any advice you could offer. So far we’ve been through 3 companies, the first he had a few meetings with that sounded hopeful but just didn’t workout, the second thought they “might” be able to do it but couldn’t tell us which cars would work, only that some would. After over a year of proposing cars, wrangling dealerships to send them photos from inside opened up cars, loosing our original contact (he left the company), kicking them to give us someone else to talk to, and chasing for updates, they still had no idea which car they could adapt and they stopped responding. We were meant to have a meeting with a third company this morning but after phoning ahead we found out they had forgotten the appointment entirely and now we’re too busy to see us.
My husband is so frustrated he’s close to giving up but it would be really great if anyone could give us a recommendation of a company we could speak to who might be able to help us and isn’t quite so dire at customer service. We’ve been told he needs an adaption to the steering wheel to help him grip it (most likely it may have to be custom as most on the market wouldn’t work for him), steering lightening, infrared controls on the floor so that he control things like the indicators with his foot and something so that he can reach the gearshift when he needs to changes gears - but not often as it’ll have to be an automatic.
We get the feeling that it’s a difficult job as his disability isn’t as common as most but hopefully we’re not asking too much. Any advice anyone can offer to get this done would be really appreciated!