About Total Ability
About Us
Our passion is to enable people with disability to safely achieve their Love to Drive!
We are passionate about providing you the latest, most reliable, highest quality and safe automotive driving aids and hand controls in Australia and New Zealand.
We also provide you solutions for transferring to and from a vehicle, wheelchair hoists and wheelchair ramps for vans.
Review from our clients
Read the full review on Google
Read the full review on Google
Read the full review on Google
Our Story
The Fadiel Italiana and Total Ability Story…
Towards the end of the 1970s, Fabio Domeneghini, then a young and gifted engineer at Venice’s Marco Polo Airport, was determined to find an elegant solution to an ongoing issue: how to quickly and safely transfer people in wheelchairs on to airplanes. His response was to design and build a folding platform that could be applied to various situations at the airport and provide easy access.
This lit a fire in Fabio for finding other solutions to common problems, and the success of his platform gave him the confidence to follow a new career helping people with disability using his innovative engineering and design skills.
He quit his job at the airport to start his own company which he called Fadiel Italiana: FAbbrica (Factory) DIspositivi (Devices) ELettroidraulici (Electrohydraulic).
Fabio’s first ‘product’ was a car clutch that someone could operate with their hand. He combined the clutch control with the gear lever, adding a switch to the usual gear lever head. The larger knob required had a distinct look that gave birth to a new name: the so-called ‘duck’ clutch was born.
Following a spinal cord injury in 2006, Australian Paul Crake had married his Italian fiancé, Daniela, and was living in Italy. Daniela researched how she could help Paul get back to driving and came across Fadiel Italiana and their category-leading Satellite Accelerator.
Paul took to driving again with his newly installed equipment and got a new lease on life and was amazed by the positive effect regaining his independence had on his mental well-being.
After the couple returned to Australia, Paul found the driving equipment here wasn’t anywhere near as advanced as the system he had been using in Italy … and a new business idea formed.
So, in 2011, Paul and Daniela founded Total Ability, and became the exclusive distributors of Fadiel Italiana in Australia and New Zealand, ensuring both countries now have access to the Italian company’s class-leading driving controls and accessibility equipment.
Fadiel Italiana is renowned for their innovative product development and in-house quality manufacturing. Their website can be viewed at https://www.fadiel.com/
Total Ability
We know first-hand through lived experience, what it is to drive with a disability and wish to make driving a safe and enjoyable experience for you. To ensure this occurs, we work in collaboration with Driver Trained OTs and Specialised Driving Instructors to assist you through the process of getting your licence and learning to drive with modifications.
A useful tool that we have developed is the Complete Guide to Driving with Disability. It takes you through the step-by-step process, explaining what to expect on the driving journey. Download the free Guide to gain more information.
We also have a network of Installers who have been trained to fit our products into your vehicle. They are supported along the way and in turn they are your contact point post installation for service and support.
We offer both vehicle and product demonstrations through our range of High Level Assessment Vehicles and our showroom in Artarmon, Sydney. Please contact us for demonstrations and further product information by clicking the Find Out More button.
Our consulting room is available to Driver Trained OTs for their off-road assessments with clients in private.
