Can You Drive With Your Feet?

Factual Questions
1
      • I was out driving with a friend today and we saw a person dricing a car on the highway with hand controls. I know of someone with paralyzed legs, and they have hand-controls in their car so he can drive: it is an automatic, there is a knob on the steering wheel and the transmission selector has an added lever arrangement for controlling accellerating and braking.
  • Then I mentioined the time I saw a paraplegic riding a motorcycle: the motorcycle had a sidecar that allowed a wheelchair to roll up into it from behind, and the sidecar had hand-controls for the motorcycle. It looked pretty funny rolling down the road with a guy in what appeared (from a distance) to be a normal sidecar, but nobody riding the motorcycle…
  • Then we got to wondering, what do people without the use of their arms or with no arms do? They learn to do everything else with their feet, are they allowed to get special controls and drive with a car them too?
2

Yes you can drive a car with no arms. I’ve seen it. The car is equipped with hand controls but the person uses their feet instead. The particular person I’m thinking of was the subject of a tv news magazine program about people overcoming severe disabilities. She’s a painter by trade. I’m sure there are others. I searched Google, but you wouldn’t believe the number of dumb jokes that pop up when you search on “no arms”.

3

A kid in my grammar school did it (as an adult ) I only knew about it at the time because it made one of the filler columns in the paper like “oddly enough”.

He was stopped by a state trooper for speeding,and only when he was stopped did the trooper realize he had no arms.

His car was rigged with some kind of pedals/levers so he could drive.

He was armless from birth but could do lots of things with his feet/toes,but needed help dressing and toilet chores,a task which one of my neighborhood buddies had the misfortune of drawing at school.

4

In the mid- 50’s there was a woman who would bring her kids to school in a 52 Plymoth that had no arms. We all thought it was cool the way she could whip that car around in the parking lot.

Also have seen several private aircraft with hand controls. The Cessna Cardnial lends itself to this very nicely as it is low and has an wide door. The rudder and ailerons atre interconected ala Ercoupe and hand brakes are added. That is all that is really necessary.

5

What would be really interesting is if she’d brought her kids to school in a '52 Plymouth that DID have arms.