Motability provides 640k customers with adapted mobility vehicles: cars, wheelchairs, scooters. To grow, the business needed to make a strategic leap - from provider of vehicles to enabler of ‘whole journey’ independence – and engage the remaining 1.2m disabled people in UK receiving personal mobility allowance. GoAbility gives us that platform: a strategic collaboration with Google and our customer community. From tailoring vehicles to individual needs, we now enable customers to tailor individual journeys. GoAbility transforms the customer experience, reframing our role from passive commercial retailer to collaborative, accessibility partner. It more meaningfully delivers our brand promise of ‘Everyday Freedom’.

As the leading supplier of mobility adapted vehicles, Motability has high awareness within the disabled community. But of the 1.8m people in the UK with restricted mobility and eligible for the Motability scheme – only one third (640,000) have used their personal mobility allowance to finance a car, wheelchair or scooter and convert to ‘customers’. The brief was simple, yet challenging: unlock those remaining 1.2m potential customers. But with high awareness and understanding of the scheme in the UK, this was not a traditional communications brief. Our primary objective was to understand the barriers preventing those people from investing in a mobility vehicle through our scheme. The benefits of a wheelchair or scooter to their independence seemed obvious: so what were we missing?

Motability’s aim is independence for all. But our research with the disabled community revealed a significant challenge: the barrier presented by journey planning. Motability only answers part of their problem: a car or wheelchair only gets you so far. You can drive to a car park, but it’s that last 100 metres of a journey where it all falls apart. It requires a huge amount of forward planning, fills people with anxiety and many simply don’t bother to travel. This insight informed a fresh strategic objective: to break down this barrier and extend the customer journey, plugging the information gap between transport hubs (car parks, train stations, bus stops) and target destinations (shops/workplaces). By doing so, we build additional value into the brand – becoming a facilitator of accessible journeys - and open up our cities (and our scheme) to more customers.

To better understand the everyday needs of our audience, we needed to see their journeys as they do. Our city streets look very different when seated in a wheelchair. Through online community research groups, and personal video diaries, we gained some key insights. Firstly, every disability is different. Motability supports people with a huge range of physical and cognitive disabilities. One person’s gentle slope, is another’s Everest. We needed to support journeys tailored to individual capabilities. Secondly, from research conducted with Deloitte, technology would be key: 'Technology acts as a filter for the outside world, and serves both as a control and a coping mechanism.' Thirdly, the breakthrough: we needed to work with the community, not for them ('Nothing about us, without us'). They are the experts who better understand the barriers to everyday freedom. Our solution would be informed by real-life experiences and serve a broad range of needs.

Our creative idea was simple and ambitious: put ‘whole journey’ accessibility in the pocket of everyone who needs it. By collaborating with Google, we could enrich the map that’s already on our customers’ phones. Google Maps currently offers no option to instantly plot an accessible journey, one that accounts for the many obstacles disabled people encounter every day. Moreover, Google’s data is open-sourced, which compromises reliability. By moving to a more trusted, closed-community model – the Motability community - we can serve Google reliable ‘whole journey’ data: ‘for the people who matter, from the people who matter’.

Our community could shape the development of a mobile tool that captures the most meaningful data: specifying needs (powered scooter /manual wheelchair); recording everyday obstacles (kerbs, cobbles, crowds); pinning photos; and rating obstacle difficulty (ultimately enabling Google Maps to output a choice of routes calibrated to individual capabilities). GoAbility could unlock ‘Everyday Freedom’.

This journey has only just begun, but GoAbility evidences a step-change in the way Motability interacts with customers and conducts our business. Ultimately, it better places us to engage and convert those 1.2m eligible customers. Our development timeline positions us perfectly to capitalise on a mobility market that’s predicted to grow 20% in 5 years, with global sales of wheelchairs set to hit US$9.6bn by 2027. In the UK, the ‘purple pound’ (disabled spending power) can inject £249bn into our retail recovery post-COVID, underscoring the urgent need for better access to our city centres. In Bristol (pilot test) GoAbility has revealed accessibility blackspots, pressuring city authorities to invest in better accessible infrastructure. In short, it's a simple digital tool with far-reaching, real-world implications for all. Our customers describe it as a ‘game-changer’. And it’s already impacting our brand culture: shifting us from 'mobility retailer' to 'accessibility partner'.