Chariots All Terrain Pushchairs Fixed Wheel or Swivel Wheel ?

Fixed Wheel versus Swivel Wheel ?

There may be some confusion over the different types of front wheel available on three wheeled pushchairs, these notes are intended to help you decide which is best for you.

A pushchair with a swivel wheel makes a pushchair supremely manoeuverable it feels an absolute dream to turn effortlessly...on the smooooth carpeted floor of the showroom.

They are good, and when Mountain Buggy do it with the Urban there's no doubt about it, it really is excellent for someone who walks in town on paved surfaces with perhaps the occasional foray onto a hard dirt path at the local park.

To begin with when shopping in town you rarely go very far in one direction you are constantly manoeuvring around obstacles, pedestrians etc. or turning at right angles between shop displays. You are constantly having to steer the pushchair and a swivel wheel is ideal for the job.

BUT...take a swivel wheel pushchair off road and it may not be ideal.

Away from the bustle of the town for most of the time you are walking in broadly the same direction you rarely need to make sharp turns, not only don't you need to steer all of the time but you don't want to have to steer - just push.

A swivel wheel pushchair has to be constantly steered whereas a fixed wheel pushchair can just be pushed with the occasional minor adjustment with light pressure to one side on the handle. To have to steer a pushchair constantly is hard work, seriously hard work, not something you want to do all the time you are walking.

Then there's the supermarket shopping trolley effect - just as you struggle to take it where you want it to go rather than where the cracks in the pavement take it, so will a swivel wheel pushchair be directed by uneven ground against your wishes. Faced with a slope across its path a swivel wheel pushchair will want to go down the hill not across it !

Ah-ha ! I hear you cry...but you can lock the swivel wheel on an Mountain Buggy Urban.

Of course you can, the problem is that a locked swivel wheel is not the same as a fixed wheel for two reasons:

A fixed wheel pushchair is designed with minimal weight distribution over the front wheel because otherwise it would be difficult to steer. For a swivel wheel pushchair weight distribution is irrelevent and therefore...higher (see notes below). When you lock a swivel wheel you don't get a fixed wheel you get something which is difficult to steer

One fault you can get on a fixed wheel pushchair is if the front wheel is not pointing precisely straight because the pushchair veers and requires constant correction (Mountain Buggy have very helpfully built in an adjustment mechanism on their fixed wheel models so that you don't have to suffer this). When you lock a swivel wheel it does not lock it precisely straight, there is sufficient 'play' for the pushchair to veer, to wander, requiring constant adjustment - this isn't just Mountain Buggy it's true of all makes.

So before you buy your pushchair and to avoid disappointment we strongly recommend that you seriously think through what your walking patterns will be and where you are less willing to compromise performance.

For guidance we suggest:

Buy a Mountain Buggy Urban with its swivel wheel if your trips are almost exclusively on paved surfaces with the occasional undemanding hard dirt path or toe path

Buy a Mountain Buggy Terrain if your paved surface trips (however frequent) are of short duration - you may have driven to town rather than walked there - BUT you do need it to work properly on rough ground

Notes

We did some tests to find out how the weight distributions differed between the Urban & Terrain front wheels.

The Urban passed 35% of its weight to the front wheel, the Terrain only 25%.

When we added a 10kg load to each pushchair the increase in front wheel weight was 25% greater on the Urban than the Terrain.

The Urban weighs 1.7kg more than the Terrain Zip Hammock to start with.