Adjusting the slope on my driveway

Post date: 2020-07-07 08:24:26

My wife's car scrapes the bottom coming in our driveway. It doesn't have the usual gutter-dip or concavity of a rolled curb, but appears to be a straight (slanted, steep) run of concrete up to the sidewalk, a level sidewalk, and then a more gentle slope up from the sidewalk. What (if any) product can simply make the slope of the first section gentler?

Here's a picture of my driveway and its interaction with the curb. The sloped section is 25 inches wide (on the oblique) with a height change of 6.5 inches (so its purely horizontal width is a little more than 24 inches, and incline about 27%). At the street side of that slope is a little lip, the same width as the curb is off to the left and right of the driveway; that lip is flat except for a rounded drop off to the street. It's about 2 inches above street level and between 7 and 8 inches wide (it's rounded on the street side, making a definite measurement difficult). Shelley's car scrapes when (I think, it's been a while since we tested this exactly) the front wheels are on the house side of the (flat) sidewalk and haven't quite reached the upwards-sloping part of the driveway on that side.

I've been looking into rubber (and similar nonasphalt, nonconcrete materials) curb ramp additions and it's not clear to me that many of them are what I need. A lot of ramps seem to be in the shape of right triangles, meant to be (or so I assume) placed up against a non-cut curb so that there's a (steep) slope one can roll things up instead of the sharp edge of the curb. Another popular type is meant to fit over a rolled curb — the gold standard among these seem to be the Bridjit brand — and have this rounded top and bottom. But as far as I can tell looking at their specifications, those mean to be installed into a profile which is somewhat concave downwards, into a gutter, and I don't have any downwards concavity in my curb-cut. Some of these brands (particularly Bridjit, who have a fit test here say there should be at least 1.75 inches of inset from the straight-line gap you're trying to bridge. Laying a yardstick between the top of the slope and the contact point at the far end of the street-side lip (which is a lot more than Bridjit's recommended 20 inches) and measuring the distance to the furthest point of the curb, I got something shy of 1.5 inches, which seems not to meet their criteria.

So, given that what's supposed to be the most adaptable standard out there doesn't work for this, what are my options? It seems that what I really want is an extremely oblique triangular prism which could nestle into the slope I have --- say, a triangle with base length 7 inches, and oblique sides of length 25 and 31.8 (if I'm doing my trig right), which could nestle into my 6.5-inch-high and 24-inch-long extant ramp and extend it into a gentler 6.5-inch high and 31-inch long ramp. Naturally, those exact specifications aren't a thing that exists and is sold, so what kind of mass-market thing (or contracted projects, or easy DIY projects) would work here?

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