About this episode
Jake Craig, national account manager for retail commercial vehicles at BraunAbility in Indiana, has spent 16 years at a company founded in 1963 by Ralph Braun, a wheelchair user himself, and says every vehicle Braun builds goes to third party durability testing before it is offered for sale. Co-host John Maselli of Model 1 Commercial Vehicles saw Braun converted minivans running 300,000 to 400,000 miles in double shifted New York taxi service. Craig calls the Toyota Sienna hybrid, rated 38 mpg combined, the best van on the market right now.
Key takeaways
- BraunAbility has never sold direct. Every commercial order, financing arrangement, and stock unit runs through the dealer network, which is where Model 1 Commercial Vehicles sits in the chain.
- Q'Straint's AmbuLock secures a stretcher with center force down into the floor and wraps the passenger in, and it lifts out of the Q'Straint floor in under 60 seconds.
- The Ferno and Stryker antler and grab bar systems Maselli calls the alternative grab the cot from the side, so the stretcher may hold in a crash while the passenger does not.
- The low floor ProMaster pairs a lowered floor and manual ramp with bus doors, unibody construction, and front wheel drive, and requires no CDL, which Craig says does several vehicles' jobs at once.
- Craig names rushing a purchase on price alone as the most common buyer mistake. Maselli adds that the van bought today is still in the fleet three to five years out.
Chapters
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:41 Jake's background
- 3:40 Electric and autonomous vehicles
- 7:42 Overview of BraunAbility
- 11:26 Importance of vehicle safety
- 16:43 Best selling vehicles
- 21:47 Common mistakes in vehicle purchasing
- 26:02 Durability of vehicles
- 27:39 Mission oriented culture
- 32:09 Innovations in vehicles
- 41:09 RUN BAMBI RUN!!
