Insider talks to Tom Morgan, chief executive of Supersmith, plus Morwenna Davenport, Tom’s sister and inspiration behind the scooter, and Linzi Mitchell, community advisor for Supersmith to understand what makes this mobility scooter, named the ‘3Scooter’, a game-changer.
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00:00Hi, my name's Tom, I'm the Chief Exec of SuperSmith. I used to live in the States together
00:21with Emily, the other founder, and I took some time out of work between finishing the
00:26States and coming back to the UK. To do that, I hired a workshop and had always had in the
00:33back of my mind that there was a problem to solve with existing mobility scooters. And
00:38I tend to do everything out of wood, and so I built the first prototype out of wood, which
00:43proved the point that we had something of real interest and potential value. But I phoned
00:48Fred up halfway through and kind of called in his expert help, and on returning to the
00:53UK, we've been working on it ever since.
00:55Yeah, my name is Morwenna Davenport. My very clever brother is the engineer who had the
01:02first idea. His name's Tom Morgan, he's the founder of SuperSmith, and that would be my
01:09involvement. There's many, you know, many thoughts. The main one would be it's self-levelling,
01:16which is revolutionary with mobility scooters. I've used three-wheelers, four-wheel wheelchairs,
01:24and everything will tip. Once you hit a camber, a slope, go off a curb, if you've got three
01:30wheels on the ground, one comes off the ground, it will tip, unless you're able to put a foot
01:35down and steady yourself. So that would be one of the key reasons. It's a better height,
01:41you can now chat to people as you go along. I spend most of my day looking up at people
01:47like this, and when you're out socialising or just scootering along, it's really inconvenient,
01:52and people tend to talk over your head. This is lightweight, it's collapsible, you can
01:58put it into a car. It looks great. I mean, you know, having a bit of kit that looks good
02:04is crucial for someone that just wants to mix in with society and just, you know, get
02:10on with their day.
02:11I'm Lindsay Mitchell. So I'm a community person that comes in and helps test the scooter,
02:21really, to see what it's like, because I've got experience of being on my own scooter,
02:24and I had another one previous to this. So I saw there was an ad put somewhere looking
02:29for people to volunteer and help out, and I thought, well, that looks interesting and
02:33exciting and being part of something quite different and innovative, really. Yeah, brilliant.
02:39Yeah, it's really exciting. And also the fact that it's so different to anything else
02:43I've tried before, because being on a four-wheeled scooter can be very difficult on certain surfaces,
02:51and I'm always having to put my leg down to try and make myself feel safe. And it took
02:57me a while to trust the scooter, I suppose, because I'm always used to something that
03:02could fall over. But this new scooter, when you hear and you feel the self-levelling kicking,
03:08it's amazing how safe you feel on it. So yeah, and it folds up, which is the same as
03:14my scooter, but I've had this a couple of years now, but it is still quite new to me.
03:20So if I had that opportunity back then, I probably would have bought one of those. So
03:25next time, when this one breaks, then I might be looking at this scooter to buy.