- Wheel Well-News
A registered Section 21 company working in road safety for children, Wheel Well collect used child car seats in order to distribute them to families who are in need of support.
Who is Wheel Well?
Named after Wheel Well Motel from the Pixar movie Cars, Wheel Well South Africa was founded in 2012 by Peggie Mars, a woman with a mission and a leading expert in child car seats and road safety for children. Her compassion and special connection with children filters down to her team who all harbour the qualities she herself embodies – patience, empathy, and kindness – while being highly skilled and knowledgeable in their field.
The company is truly unique in that it is the only one in the world like it, where used car seats are collected from donors, refurbished to high compliance standards, and redistributed to families in need. Today, more than 9,000 car seats have been donated.
Why Wheel Well?
During her research in the beginning, Peggie found horrific statistics of child road deaths in South Africa and yet nothing was done to alleviate this. Furthermore, car seats for kids were largely incorrectly fitted, installed, or adjusted, and therefore not optimal for the safety of the child. This necessitated the beginning of Car Seats for Kids, a campaign that enabled lower-income families to obtain a seat for an affordable donation, one that is the correct size for the child.
Today, Wheel Well works tirelessly to raise awareness about child restraints, educate parents on the correct use and installation, and motivate change in the rules and regulations of the National Road Traffic act. They would like to see that appropriate child restraints are made mandatory, that they adhere to the EU tested regulations and standards, and in terms of vehicle load that children are counted as one person.
What Does Wheel Well Do?
It’s clear that Wheel Well’s single-minded focus is for the safety of children, whatever their financial situation. It’s with this in mind that they work towards ensuring that lower-income families can also benefit from keeping their child properly and safely buckled up while driving in a car.
Their process in a nutshell:
- Collect pre-loved child car seats from drop-off points like Supa Quick
- Test if the seat is in a condition to be refurbished
- Clean and recondition to as good-as-new state and up to EU regulations and standards
- Redistribute the newly conditioned seats to lower-income families
- Recycle seats that are unsuitable to refurbishing
While their goal is ensuring that there are always enough and as many child seats as possible to go around, they also go beyond their key call of duty in a variety of ways. Some of the life-changing products and campaigns initiated by Wheel Well:
- Halo Beanie Project
- Seat belt re-positioner for kids
As Peggie succinctly put it, Wheel Well exists because what it does “needs to be done”.
Children depend on you for their safety, don’t compromise because you can’t afford a suitable car seat for them.
You can play your part – if you have a car seat that your child has outgrown, why not make a generous donation by dropping it off at your nearest Supa Quick and let a needy child benefit?
Disclaimer: This information is for educational or informational purposes only. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, reliability, and accuracy of this information. The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and not necessarily the views of Supa Quick.
