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This is ‘Not a Wheelchair’ – Introducing The Rig

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A YouTuber built the off-road wheelchair the medical supply industry wouldn’t.

Zack Nelson has spent years destroying phones for a living on JerryRigEverything, but his latest build isn’t a durability test — it’s a mobility device he designed for his own wife. In July 2020, Nelson launched The Rig, an electric all-terrain vehicle made for wheelchair users, alongside a new company called Not A Wheelchair. The project came out of watching his wife, Cambry, get boxed in by what the existing market offered: devices that cost as much as a used car and still couldn’t handle a dirt trail.

• The Rig runs on an aluminum frame built with standard off-road bicycle parts, chosen specifically so owners can get repairs done at a normal bike shop instead of a specialty medical supplier.
• Electric quad propulsion pushes it to speeds up to 12 mph across dirt, gravel, and rough terrain.
• It launched at a starting price of $4,750 — undercutting the $10,000 to $20,000 typically charged for commercial off-road wheelchairs.

Eighteen Months in Development

Nelson didn’t sketch this out over a weekend. He spent roughly a year and a half working through the design before The Rig was ready for customers, partnering with Utah Trikes to actually engineer and manufacture the vehicle rather than trying to build it solo out of a garage. Utah Trikes brought the off-road bike parts expertise; Nelson brought the real-world use case — his wife needed something that could keep up with him on trails, not just roll around a parking lot.

We wanted to create something affordable, and capable and I think we’ve done it.

Importance of Standard Bike Parts

The decision to build The Rig around off-road bicycle components isn’t just about cost at purchase — it’s about cost over the vehicle’s lifetime. Traditional off-road wheelchairs often rely on proprietary parts that require shipping a unit back to the manufacturer for even minor fixes. By sourcing shocks, tires, and drivetrain components that any bike shop already stocks, Nelson and Utah Trikes built a machine that owners can keep running themselves, the same logic that governs a lot of the DIY builds in the van life and overlanding space, where owners favor parts they can actually source on the road over anything proprietary.

Undercutting a $20,000 Market

The pricing is the part that made The Rig news beyond the mobility-device niche. Commercial off-road wheelchairs — the kind built for hunting, fishing, or just getting off pavement — routinely list between $10,000 and $20,000. The Rig launched at $4,750, a price point Nelson framed as the whole point of the project: not a luxury add-on, but a device priced so people could actually afford to buy one.

Built From a Personal Need

None of this started as a business plan. Nelson built The Rig because his wife wanted to get out on the same terrain he could reach on foot or on a bike, and nothing on the market did that without a five-figure price tag. That’s the same instinct that drives a lot of outdoor gear innovation — someone hits a wall with what’s commercially available and just builds the thing themselves, the way a lot of the off-grid and overland builds covered in the outdoors space tend to start.

Nelson said the company plans to keep building on the platform over the next several years rather than treating the initial version as a finished product — meaning the $4,750 quad that launched in July 2020 is likely the baseline, not the ceiling, for what Not A Wheelchair puts out next.