(Images: Dimitri Timtchenko)
Bruce Thomson is an industrial design professor at Humber College in Toronto. He assigned his senior students to design a distinctively Canadian car. Dimitri Timtchenko responded with not a poutine-fueled truck, but a snowmobile. In Canada’s far north, people of the First Nations often depend on snowmobiles for daily transportation. Those who are confined to wheelchairs are largely out of luck. So Timtchenko designed a snowmobile that is wheelchair-accessible. Jalopnik quotes him:
"I just started brainstorming about how recreational vehicles could be useful in some way, and it trickled down to the fact in the Arctic regions, the Inuit there just can't function if they're in a wheelchair."
"What usually happens is you're sent down to a warmer village—you just can't live up there. So I wanted to design a vehicle to allow these people to function within these villages."