Really they spawned a huge industry of balance-operated electric scooter...things... The branding was much more accurate than I think even they hoped as they were a segue to more cost effective solutions.
I think it's a pretty good cautionary tale for those looking to follow the Tesla model. Don't target the ultra-high end unless you have enough of a technological and legal moat to fend off the vastly simplified and cost effective competitors.
It's happening right now, they simply make too much sense. Some places are even providing low interest loans to foster their adoption to reduce car traffic (Eg: Nelson, BC).
For places with good weather a decent part of the year, and safe-enough bike lanes (that's the main issue) this seems near-inevitable.
Australian here: ebikes are crazy popular in both Sydney and Melbourne. I'm a regular cyclist and I get overtaken about 10 times per trip by ebikes.
If I didn't have such as short commute, I would jump on it!
We have above-average bike lanes (in some suburbs, anyway), so that's not a major issue. A major concern seems to be security. My neighbor had a battery stolen from his ebike while he was getting beer.
> The 'revolutionary' impact of the Segway might still come to pass.
The self balancing aspect was what segway bought to the table. There was nothing revolutionary about the battery and motor. They originally even used NIMH batteries.
It was lightweight high performance lithium batteries that pushed the electric alternative transport market.
I don’t know if it is covid-induced insanity, but I laughed way too much at this. There could be some dystopian cyberpunk commercial showing how much the inventor loved the invention here...
Sometime around 2012, my parents got me a segway tour in a city I was planning to visit one time. Kind of the dorkiest thing ever. My girlfriend and I grudgingly did it, and it ended up being awesome. Even though you look super dorky, those things are really fun, and they're a great way to get a tour of a lot of city in a short amount of time without a lot of exhaustion. Since you're in a group, you're with a bunch of other dorks and you all look like dorks together, but you're all having fun anyway so you don't care. I was really surprised how quickly they stop and how well they can turn.
Wow that is unfortunate, thanks for the clarification, I'm not familiar with the area or Segways, though I do go to DC every few years for the museums.
The first accident was coming down 15th by the treasury where there are large bollards on the sidewalk- an older gentleman in his sixties was zipping around and he went full speed down the sidewalk and clipped the wheel on the very edge of one and it spun around throwing him off- very much like going over the handlebars on a bike. I assume he broke something between his wrist and collar bone (or both).
The next one was going off a sidewalk if memory serves but was minor.
The third one was over on the north side of the Capitol- we were idling around while the guide was talking and this older lady in her fifties or sixties was kinda floating through the crowd but didn't seem out of control- she went around this big tree and either lost control or wasn't paying attention as it was getting dark and went full speed around the side of a tree and ran right in to a lamp post. It knocked her out.
I was getting nervous riding back feeling like we were all going to experience some mishap.
Kinda feels like age of the people may have been a factor here. Segways do require good reaction times and constant awareness of your surroundings because they don't stop (even when stationary they have power to the wheels keeping them balanced, and if you move they move) and it the tour guide thought anyone was too young, old, or otherwise not capable to control the vehicle, they shouldn't have let them go out in public.
Not saying that was the only factor, it could easily have been the tour guide not giving adequate safety instructions or simply people ignoring those instructions... or a mixture of all three!
I definitely recommend it! The tour I did went around the tidal basin and visited all the major monuments on the western half of the mall. I really enjoyed the stories and factoids from the tour guide—she pointed out a lot of stuff I had missed on self-guided walking tours. I think the tour agency to was somewhere near the GW campus, but I forget the name.
Don't be so judgemental. I could probably find a lot of things in your life which I would find "dorky". There is no universal definition of Dorkiness, it is a condescending term for things that people don't agree with, without any kind of justification. It is a matter of personal taste and opinion. Keep it to yourself please.
Perhaps I am being too sensitive, I am trying to introspect. What's clear to me is that when we call people nerds, dorks, weirdos, geeks, etc. it has an undertone of condescence. May be it triggered me because I was called a nerd in highschool and throughout college, almost always in a derogatory manner. What's wrong with being nerdy and interested in technology and science and math I said to myself and ignored others as much as possible.
I can understand this very well because the same happened with me. It's important for us to learn to not care about what others think of us, to see these actions by others as more of a challenge than an insult, and to completely own what we do. People like to play games where they test each others confidence, and unfortunately, perceived weakness is often met with ridicule, rather than empathy.
I mean, more power to the people who don't care what others think right? No reason to care if others find something dorky. I would focus on yourself if you find that you keep yourself from doing harmless things because of what other people think.
Reminds me of seeing an imagine of a lady walking her dog while riding a segway with people making fun of her. My thought was what if she'd blown out her knee? Or was like a friend of mine who had really bad arthritis in his hips. Or my 85 year old dad who can ride a bicycle, ride a horse, drive a truck, but because of his sciatica can't walk more than an 1/8 of a mile.
But dorky stuff can be a lot of fun. Maybe it's because I'm not a native English speaker but "dorky" doesn't have a super negative connotation to me, it can be quite endearing actually.
The helmets don't help. Without those... still dorky? Not sure. Less so, at least, but does the dorkiness decrease enough to pass under the threshold of ultimate dorkiness?
Dorky is such a razor-edge. Basically it means you're doing something culturally unusual that maybe has connotations of being "too technical" at the expense of, I guess aesthetics. Like using technology to get around instead of moving through the world like a graceful gazelle with pure and beautiful movements that approach art, you know like all of us do all the time when we're not on Segways riiiight? (cue 5 seconds of news report on obesity epidemic with the usual footage of random overweight people lumbering down the street)
Thing is, even iPhones were dorky at first. So then how did iPhones become cool (except secretly as a Gen-Xer who lived 10 years of life without so much as an Atari, I still think you're all dorks and myself too but anyway) but Segways remained dorky? Ironically the only explanation I come up with is that they (Segways) never became wildly popular. But that's essentially a circular argument. I dunno, I dont expect I'll ever be able to explain the behavior of "the crowd."
Lol. Thanks for that laugh. Ironically, as you get older, doing something 'dorky' in public and not caring what anyone thinks is a signal of total individualism/self-assurance. Which is cool in my book.
I don't think that's fair. I did 73km of walking on the 3 days I spent in Paris. I'm a relatively fit guy and by the end of it I had some pretty severe pain in my feet. I would've been grateful for some way of seeing everything and taking the load off at the same time.
The locals aren't trying to maximize the value of their limited vacation time.
Yes, do as the locals do is a great way to go about actually knowing a place. But if you want to spend one day of your multi-day trip ticking off things to see in a more efficient fashion-- on a "hop-on, hop-off" bus or Segway or whatever-- go for it. I've been on several trips with my kids (youngest, now 6) where a day of easy sightseeing in the middle has been a lifesaver.
I'm sorry-- if I visit for a week, whether I take a bus tour one day or continue to travel like a local doesn't affect these things. You'll have to find different boogeymen to blame instead of a symptom.
While those are good options for going from point A to point B, you lose a lot of the qualities of just wandering around a new city and exploring new things.
Another issue with walking as a tourist is you need to balance walking comfort (say, sneakers) with shoes that don't feel too casual for visiting a restaurant or bar. I inevitably wear street shoes, which means you can feel the impact of a full day walking. Yes, I know there are often dorky shoes people wear that straddle the line.
The grandparent poster is reporting their subjective feeling about something they've observed, so presumably race is being mentioned, along with assumed nationality, and inferred attitude because those are part of the subjective impression the poster was left with from their experiences.
Americans systematically avoid hard discussions, to preserve that "everyone is happy" feeling
Just look at a typical city council video in the United States. Everyone who is there is old (because they have nothing better to do than spending 4 hours in a city council meeting), 60+, and they're against anything new.
I lived in downtown Chicago when Segways came out, and while the tourists ate them up, the locals hated them.
Since everyone using them was still also learning how to ride them, they were constantly crashing into cars, people, dogs, gardens, and anything else that wasn't moving out of their way. The complaints to the city were endless, and I think the local alderman managed to get some kind of restrictions on them.
I thought they seemed like a good idea, though a little large. I expected they'd eventually take off, but now that I live somewhere that tourists don't venture, I'd actually forgotten that Segways exist.
I think the seeds of that good idea became the much more compact electric scooter (Bird and friends), and for those willing to climb more of a learning curve, eskate and onewheel.
The critical thing for all of those, though, is that they can work as last mile devices because you can carry them indoors, onto buses/trains, etc. A segway is strictly worse than a bike in that regard because you still have to park it outside somewhere, but it's an awkward shape that doesn't fit into the usual facilities for doing so (and obviously it wasn't supposed to get wet, either).
Once my younger brother got big enough to want to push the shopping cart at the grocery store, I lived in constant fear for the health of my Achilles tendons. I don't know how many times he crashed into the back of my ankle, and those were only when I wasn't watching him like a hawk.
I look at a Segway and wonder where that deck would intersect with my ankles today.
heh, I spent 30 minutes in San Fran trying to learn to ride one of those Scoot moped electric scooter things. Almost fell in the garage several times. Thankfully, it's much easier on the street - more grip, and low-speed turns on an incline are probably the worst.
Still, it's scary to think about how dangerous they are and iirc you can ride them without any sort of motorcycle license.
Got pulled over for going down a "one way after dark" street. Asked the cop how I was supposed to know. He said "Natives just do." Didn't give me a ticket though.
Agree. I did tours twice with them and they’re really fun to ride. I’d sure rather own an ebike though to actually get around (or a bicycle or a moped or most other things)
I've never ridden a segway before, but I can honestly say i've always secretly wanted to. Damn people look silly riding them, but they way they just effortlessly glide along looks fun to try at least once.
I think the marketing approach they took was part of the problem. I remember early segway ads and stuff, they always took this elitist 'we're going to change the world' sort of spin with their ads that was trying to appeal to a higher end market more interested in fads than anything else. They hooked the 'stubborn early adoptors' while alienating the larger market. At least in my opinion.
This is how their marketing always came across to me and probably helped form my opinions on segways and similar vehicles in general and I doubt I'm alone in my views.
The funny thing is, I bet if they'd found a way to appeal to the extreme sports market they may have found a small niche for themselves. Strange vehicles like this seem to keep a strange second life in that market.
I still see people occasionally riding those razor scooters that were popular for a while in the early 2000's, but, it's always people that are really good at them have spent lots of money customizing them and use them for trick riding. And of course, the skateboard, which has gone through a ton of designs and incarnations, but has been kept alive for half a century or more by people pushing it do the limits. Despite being fairly impractical for primary transportation and I tried for a while as a teenager.
I'm not sure if segways are the best for this, but I bet with some effort, they could have created a small market there that would probably still be popular.
On that note though, I do still see a fair amount of people riding devices clearly inspired by the segway, those handle-less varieties and other gyroscope balanced things and such. So, I think they're not dead so much as they've evolved and the concept of 'personal electric vehicle' has grown beyond what the segway originally was.
I do feel like the electric vehicle future they marketed is coming, they're just not the leaders they told us they'd be and instead of one strange new thing, we've got a variety of things now and on the horizon.
I had a chance to ride an off road segway once and it was pretty fun, so I'd recommend it if you get the chance.
Never seen a segway advert, so I never really got an elitist vibe from them (although I did see one for a similar product marketed at kids called a dareway - it was this kind of standing Davros chair thing that balanced on two drive wheels and a number of hidden casters).
Not sure if this was true of the newer Segways, but the first generations of Segways had the performance limits encoded into the key. So you could turn it on with a key to train someone to use it, or if you had access to the tools, program an unlocked key that allowed you to go faster than factory spec.
I had a go on an off road one fairly recently (maybe a year or two ago at most?) And it was pretty fun! A comment above says they aren't good for cities because they're too fast for the path and too slow for a cycle lane, but I think they're great for country lanes and open grass.
I've done two Segway tours at Disney World and it was awesome. The first one was at Epcot with my son. We got into the part before it opened and we were the only ones on the tour so we got to see and do some things that bigger groups don't. The second time was a bigger group with more family members at Wilderness Lodge using off-road Segways. This was probably even more fun as we got to see a lot of things that we would never have seen; horse barns, lakes, fields, flowers, bats, etc.
All in all, the Segway tours were a really great way to see a lot of things you don't normally see at Disney. I would totally recommend taking the tour if they still offered it.
The hoverboards don’t use the same technology, which is what allows them to be so cheap. My understanding is that they effectively replace the electronic feedback control system of the segway with the user’s biological one.
No, they do indeed use the same technology. They have an accelerator fed into a micro-controller that provides the exact wheel torque necessary to prevent the user. Which is exactly how a Segway works.
I still feel like Segway needs a case study regarding how they were able to garner so much hype before it was announced. I remember the breathless "change the world" articles quite well (from nearly 20 years ago, yikes!). This sentence from the Wikipedia article is, well, humorous: "John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than the Internet".
Was really baffling to me at the time how they had such amazing PR.
You can't really force that level of hype. It was a genuinely new form of transport that people wanted to think about. It was basically viral and eventually it wasn't cool anymore
But it stuck around for 20 years and saw a lot of real world usage in the mid 2000s. You can't really call it a fluke if people buy it for that many years in a row-- there is some utility there
Did it? That's news to me. I've only ever seen the Segway used for city tours. I've honestly never seen it in a different context. Seems like a marginal use of a marginal tech to me...
Edit: I lie! I once saw it used by a kids' magician at a birthday party. Pretty marginal use, too.
Going by anecdote, I've seen them used by many mall cops, city tours, downtown cops, some Taiwanese military unit used them as a meme, and some rich people here in the US owned them in their house literally just for fun. I think they were going for less than 10k used so that was play money for them.
Again, that they are going out of production shows that they are definitely not bigger than the internet. But they certainly aren't vaporware or even a failed product. Someone somewhere made a profit, and someone somewhere got non-zero utility out of it
Something short of "bigger than the internet" ("people familiar with the matter" really did call it that even before it was revealed what it was) can still be a popular product. In recent years, as commented here, there were a bunch of new entrants to the category, so yes it was useful to somebody.
It was also a time before social media, mass consumer internet, and all the high-tech things we take for granted today. It was a futuristic device that looked and sounded fantastic with no real competition. People were amazed by the balancing tech alone (and there was a similar wheelchair prototype).
Precisely. There was a lot of press about a "secret" transformative invention w some mysterious tech related to transportation.
Before it was revealed, I remember reading an article where the author said something like, "we're pretty sure it's a 2 wheeled electric scooter that self corrects it's balance."
I remember thinking "this doesn't seem worthy of the hype."
That being said, even though it didn't revolutionize transportation, its use was certainly more widespread than I had expected.
I think the era--to the grandparents' point--was a significant factor. Back then we still believed in immediately transformational technology. There was a widespread belief that an aviation or space-travel breakthrough was imminent. There was hope for incredible new energy sources. Effectively, there was a collective hope that there were undiscovered realms of physics that would unlock a completely new period of human history.
We have made amazing technological leaps in the last 20 years, but you don't have to go far searching Hacker News to find articles complaining about evolutionary progress instead of revolutionary.
I wonder what Gen Z thinks about technological progress. As a millennial that straddled the analog-digital divide, I took huge leaps of progress for granted. My friends and I compared American and Soviet fighter jets, we compared horsepower in muscle cars, we compared specs on processors. We also tinkered with everything, and nearly every system could be easily understood by poking at the internals. Now, what's the point?
Anyway, that's a long way of saying that the Segway hype is a generational thing, I don't think we'll ever see anything like that again.
Those years before the digital transition held a lot of optimism and general hype around what the future would bring. The lack of constant media stimulus also let imaginations run wild. It reminds me of the fantastical predictions of the 70s with jet cars and robot maids.
I remember spending far too much time on a forum built around what “it” was, called theitquestion.com. Nobody knew what it was going to be so there was a lot of speculation. Personally I was extremely disappointed by “it”.
>This mysterious invention, reportedly created by National Medal of Technology Award winner, Dean Kamen, is on everyone's lips and has captured everyone's imaginations.
> It was also a time before ... mass consumer internet
I remember reading about its launch on mass consumer internet. (Why do I feel like people place the date for the start of mass consumer internet too late?) Here is a contemporaneous article from Time Magazine's website, which is a pretty mainstream, mass consumer publication: http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,...
In 2001 people still had dialup with AOL CDs. ISDN was the expensive corporate line. DSL was the fancy new broadband. Palm Pilot's and other mobile organizers were still common. Constant internet everywhere you go didn't exist.
Some people I knew had cable modems in 2001, and a few years before that. Though I read an article much like the one I linked on a 56k modem. (not AOL)
I think my first wifi gear was ~1 year after that. Orinoco chipset. That was a bit ahead of most people at that time though.
But yes, this part wasn't there:
> Constant internet everywhere you go didn't exist.
Modern transportation in cities is a very hard problem that we're still trying to solve. At some point Segway looked like it might be what we needed since it looked like nothing we had ever tried before. It was small like a bike but you were standing up, it was all electric and super easy to use. It was not really a stretch to imagine that this could be the future of city transportation.
I mean, remember the hyperloop? It solves a different transportation problem, but there are many parallels. When you take the time to think about it you can see that it doesn't really add up, but man if it could it could be amazing.
Honestly, it just felt like a ton of tech circle-jerking to me. The gyroscope system on the Segway was really cool, but it was like once it got some good words from some tech luminaries like Steve Jobs, all these other people were like trying to one-up each other saying how revolutionary it was. When it finally came out it was pretty much universally ridiculed by every average joe (not so much ridiculed for what it was, which was a neat scooter, but ridiculed for its unwarranted hype).
I was thinking the exact same thing. I remember the build-up leading to release where they were talking about it literally changing mankind. "Cities will never be the same" and all that. I wish I could find some of the articles - and then when it released it was like... so... a scooter? How is this changing life? What's your plan for rainy days? Oh... we just get sopping wet? Ya, not going to change cities and close down all roads.
Yeah it was funny. It hit so far below the hype expectations, many (myself included) thought the Segway wasn't even "IT", expecting the real announcement to come later.
It’s not much different from all the autonomous driving stuff that was going to mean kids today would have a personal robo-chauffeur for the rest of their lives and would never need to get a license.
That's different. It's one thing to hype something up, but then the capabilities just aren't as futuristic as advertised (I think most people agree fully autonomous cars would be revolutionary), but with the Segway it was completely hyped, then when it was released everyone went "THAT'S your 'world changing' invention??"
Do you think they had good PR though? I would have much preferred to ride a Segway to work than to bike (sweaty/helmet hair) or take public transit (delayed/crowded) but a Segway is just so... dorky.
Their tech got a lot of PR hype but the actual product didn’t get nearly enough hype to sell it to their potential customers.
A lot of it was because of how vague they were - codename, the idea that cities would be designed for it, etc. I remember that really clearly. There were some vague comments and enthusiasm from trusted tech names. So, before launch, they had everyone desperate to find out what it was.
Well, that's a trick you can pull exactly once. The next time Dean Kamen launches something I'll just ignore it completely until my life intersects with it in a natural way. Consider that burned.
Not all their PR was fantastic, in Atlanta they were shown off in the airport and for postal service employees. The trouble was in both cases the pictures were of very obese employees of either organization using them.
I remember back thinking the only market was government, there were references to the ADA in the article as well.
I've seen somebody driving a wheelchair version in a supermarket (also later outside, it was fast) https://www.segfree.co.za/ It seems the use Segway parts so not sure if that product can continue.
The article tries to blame all sort of things for not selling well, but the real reason is super simple: They were too expensive.
Back when they came out I too was affected by the hype and wanted to get one - until I saw the price and said "never mind".
Drop the price to 1/10 of the amount, to $500, and it would still be expensive, but at least there's something to talk about there. At $5000 it was an easy decision not to get it.
Yeah, very funny to hear “durability” blamed in the article - in that apparently they were too durable so people who bought them didn’t throw them out and buy new ones periodically.
Apart from how terrible the attitude of “we should have made the product more disposable to milk more cash out of the only people who bought it, creating a lot more e-waste in the process” is, do they really think that people would have kept buying them if they kept breaking?
> but the real reason is super simple: They were too expensive
Disagree. I wouldn't buy one if they were one-tenth the price (and I think that sentiment would be shared by many people). The real reason is that it was and is a stupid product, even if some of the technology involved was innovative.
Stupid now that you’ve only seen wealthy dorks on them or stupid like people don’t want rechargeable urban mobility devices? Because in Denver, before COVID, there were maybe four escooter outfits and people flying all over on them. Seems like they almost didn’t have enough.
I think they had a brilliant idea, they were too early to the market, over marketed and then simply priced themselves out of contention. I’ll never understand why they didn’t have a cost reduced model
Stupid because the forward facing standing stance is wrong for mobility. Standing sideways is better for a fixed stance on a moving platform (e.g. surfboards, skateboards, snowboards, sailboards, etc). If you're forward facing then you should have active independent movement between the two legs (as with walking, running, skiing, ice-skating, etc).
I disagree. I own a solowheel and after the initial learning curve it became safer and even more intuitive than walking. IMO, the sidestance may be okay if one switches sides as to exercise the body and the brain both ways. In reality people stick to whatever their dominant leg is upfront. Feels weird and prone to skeletomuscular imbalances.
Totally unrelated I am now 35 and feel completely unfulfilled in life when I look at everything Kamen does. I would love to work at a full time research institute experimenting and innovating.
I remember back when Dean Kamen managed an epic PR campaign: there were weeks of coverage speculating about what “It” was and how it would transform cities and daily life. At least for those of us on the early web, it was an Apple-scale PR event.
Then it actually launched and everyone had a disappointed “that's it?” I actually would not have predicted that it would take until 2020 to fold.
"Segway" is a brand that has passed through several hands after Dean Kaman sold it a while back.
This sounds to me like the New Hampshire plant is no longer going to manufacture Segway units, rather than the technology being discontinued altogether.
Ninebot of China acquired Segway and uses the IP to defend their self-balancing inventions.
Oh, I see that it does, sorry, skimmed the article.
I still think the main news here is just that the legacy Segway PT unit is being discontinued, along with the US manufacturing facilities in New Hampshire, where it doesn't make sense for a Chinese company to be manufacturing.
Seems to me like Mark Wilson of Fast company is trying to make a bigger story out of that, when I'm not sure there is one.
Fast Company has learned that the Segway brand will retire the last Segway as we know it, the Segway PT. Manufacturing at the Bedford, New Hampshire, plant will stop July 15
We had a small fleet (12 of them) at the manufacturing plant I worked at back in 2007.
They were great because staff could save tons of time running back to the production area or warehouse. Maintenance had the models with tool bags on the sides.
They were very expensive to repair, and had lots of quirks that needed firmware updates and such.
We got acquired and the new parent company wouldn’t take the liability, so I had to pallet them up and sell the whole lot on eBay.
The same can be achieved using 3-wheel kick bikes of the type often used in hospitals or bicycles. They're cheaper, they give the staff a bit - but not too much - of a workout, they rarely break down and you never have to update any firmware.
Wow, I had no idea they still made them. I remember on the 8th floor at the Pac Med building of Amazon in early 2000 Jeff giggling his ass off on one of those every day for a week. I'd never seen one since.
I like buying new tech, and I used to be into fun quirky ways to get around. The Segway was just too expensive without enough benefit. I guess I've never lived close enough to work to consider walking, but that seems to be the main appeal.
Now I've got a friend trying to convince me to buy a OneWheel. I just can't justify $1500 for a weird skateboard when I could literally order an electric car on Alibaba for that much money.
I figure between legs, bikes, cars, trains and planes, we've pretty much got transportation solved. Segway tried to solve what bikes solved a hundred years earlier. But bikes are less expensive, are also really fun, and are great exercise.
OneWheel looks like a fun way to kill yourself. Looking at their commercials even simple routes are extreme.
I've rode inline skates to work, ride kick scooter and bicycle. But it was Heelys stop from 5 km/s to 0 face down on asphalt that was the worst. Quick change of direction - from forward to into the ground. Too quick for brain but hands took part of the momentum. Palms heart, it would be unfortunate to be programmer with broken palms, I was lucky. Stay safe.
I see people riding them frequently in SF. They seem to ride pretty normally and most people use bike lanes (sounds silly but they go fast enough). I have heard that the biggest problem is the automatic braking/throttling to limit top speed kicking in on downhills, triggering face plants. As long as you are good at maintaining balance on a board and stick to flattish bike lanes they seem pretty safe
Onewheel owner with about 100 miles ridden chiming in: I think it's a great way to have fun, love riding mine on trails and on short trips for takeout, feels so similar to snowboarding to me, but a terrible choice for commuting. Expensive, short-ranged and slow compared to say, an e-skateboard, e-scooter, or just a bike (electric or not).
I fully agree with whoever told you that the automatic braking is dangerous on downhills, that has been the source of all my scariest Onewheel moments and now I don't go above 10-12 mph when riding downhill, which of course is much slower than a safe downhill speed on a regular bike.
Mmm, I meant don't take it like electric scooter. I have not tried but failure mode compound with speed would kill. Official version advertises as casual [1], should be extreme [2]. At least wear palms protection - it is a weak point.
And for example kick scooter is not that safe. Inline skates on the same speed gives much more control. Bicycle is yet safer.
I like the idea - should be fun to ride, I do not like product placement.
Worth noting, Segway still has a broad selection of products including scooters, electric dirt bikes, an AI-enhanced personal transport assistant, and go karts. https://www.segway.com
I remember when the segway first was announced (or leaked?) on slashdot. Based on the ensuing posts and comments (slashdot was the sort-of hacker news of the day, in 2001) it was going to revolutionize the world. Instead, the hype and public opinion travelled faster than the product, and it sort of never took off. I took it as my quintessential lesson in how to manage the announcement and deployment of novel technologies like robotics. Self driving cars seem similar in a lot of ways.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
the segway brand is now well known and successfuly as the Segway-Ninebot company that produces for example all of the electric scooters for Lyft.
FTA:
> Moreover, Segway said the iconic and oft-ridiculed scooter only accounted for 1.5 percent of the company’s revenue.
The submission title seems to imply the company is shutting down when in reality they are ending production of 1.5% of their revenue
It'll just be on conventionally-oriented two-wheeled electric mobility devices: scooters and ebikes.
I hope it happens!
I think it's a pretty good cautionary tale for those looking to follow the Tesla model. Don't target the ultra-high end unless you have enough of a technological and legal moat to fend off the vastly simplified and cost effective competitors.
For places with good weather a decent part of the year, and safe-enough bike lanes (that's the main issue) this seems near-inevitable.
If I didn't have such as short commute, I would jump on it!
We have above-average bike lanes (in some suburbs, anyway), so that's not a major issue. A major concern seems to be security. My neighbor had a battery stolen from his ebike while he was getting beer.
The self balancing aspect was what segway bought to the table. There was nothing revolutionary about the battery and motor. They originally even used NIMH batteries.
It was lightweight high performance lithium batteries that pushed the electric alternative transport market.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-11416654
The tour I did in DC had 3 accidents in 75 minutes with ambulances called for two of them. It was wild.
Sorry I have to ask but this reads weird to me, but do you mean accidents in DC or accidents with 3 people from your tour?
The next one was going off a sidewalk if memory serves but was minor.
The third one was over on the north side of the Capitol- we were idling around while the guide was talking and this older lady in her fifties or sixties was kinda floating through the crowd but didn't seem out of control- she went around this big tree and either lost control or wasn't paying attention as it was getting dark and went full speed around the side of a tree and ran right in to a lamp post. It knocked her out.
I was getting nervous riding back feeling like we were all going to experience some mishap.
Not saying that was the only factor, it could easily have been the tour guide not giving adequate safety instructions or simply people ignoring those instructions... or a mixture of all three!
But dorky stuff can be a lot of fun. Maybe it's because I'm not a native English speaker but "dorky" doesn't have a super negative connotation to me, it can be quite endearing actually.
Dorky is such a razor-edge. Basically it means you're doing something culturally unusual that maybe has connotations of being "too technical" at the expense of, I guess aesthetics. Like using technology to get around instead of moving through the world like a graceful gazelle with pure and beautiful movements that approach art, you know like all of us do all the time when we're not on Segways riiiight? (cue 5 seconds of news report on obesity epidemic with the usual footage of random overweight people lumbering down the street)
Thing is, even iPhones were dorky at first. So then how did iPhones become cool (except secretly as a Gen-Xer who lived 10 years of life without so much as an Atari, I still think you're all dorks and myself too but anyway) but Segways remained dorky? Ironically the only explanation I come up with is that they (Segways) never became wildly popular. But that's essentially a circular argument. I dunno, I dont expect I'll ever be able to explain the behavior of "the crowd."
Segway made it into Weird Al's "White and Nerdy" parody song https://youtu.be/N9qYF9DZPdw?t=74
Walk, take the public bus, take the metro.
Skip tuktuks, Segways, quads, organized tours, "sightseeing" private double decker buses.
Gentrification is killing the beauty of Europe and other places, tired feet or not.
Yes, do as the locals do is a great way to go about actually knowing a place. But if you want to spend one day of your multi-day trip ticking off things to see in a more efficient fashion-- on a "hop-on, hop-off" bus or Segway or whatever-- go for it. I've been on several trips with my kids (youngest, now 6) where a day of easy sightseeing in the middle has been a lifesaver.
Locals just have to pick up the trash, see the prices skyrocket and remember how unique the place uses to be.
Have a nice day.
It's not the occasional use of a bus tour that does it.
You'll have to find a different boogeyman to blame instead of a symptom.
Here are some of his recent comments:
Americans systematically avoid hard discussions, to preserve that "everyone is happy" feeling
Just look at a typical city council video in the United States. Everyone who is there is old (because they have nothing better to do than spending 4 hours in a city council meeting), 60+, and they're against anything new.
Since everyone using them was still also learning how to ride them, they were constantly crashing into cars, people, dogs, gardens, and anything else that wasn't moving out of their way. The complaints to the city were endless, and I think the local alderman managed to get some kind of restrictions on them.
I thought they seemed like a good idea, though a little large. I expected they'd eventually take off, but now that I live somewhere that tourists don't venture, I'd actually forgotten that Segways exist.
The critical thing for all of those, though, is that they can work as last mile devices because you can carry them indoors, onto buses/trains, etc. A segway is strictly worse than a bike in that regard because you still have to park it outside somewhere, but it's an awkward shape that doesn't fit into the usual facilities for doing so (and obviously it wasn't supposed to get wet, either).
I look at a Segway and wonder where that deck would intersect with my ankles today.
Still, it's scary to think about how dangerous they are and iirc you can ride them without any sort of motorcycle license.
Got pulled over for going down a "one way after dark" street. Asked the cop how I was supposed to know. He said "Natives just do." Didn't give me a ticket though.
Sorry, random unrelated memories.
I think the marketing approach they took was part of the problem. I remember early segway ads and stuff, they always took this elitist 'we're going to change the world' sort of spin with their ads that was trying to appeal to a higher end market more interested in fads than anything else. They hooked the 'stubborn early adoptors' while alienating the larger market. At least in my opinion.
This is how their marketing always came across to me and probably helped form my opinions on segways and similar vehicles in general and I doubt I'm alone in my views.
The funny thing is, I bet if they'd found a way to appeal to the extreme sports market they may have found a small niche for themselves. Strange vehicles like this seem to keep a strange second life in that market.
I still see people occasionally riding those razor scooters that were popular for a while in the early 2000's, but, it's always people that are really good at them have spent lots of money customizing them and use them for trick riding. And of course, the skateboard, which has gone through a ton of designs and incarnations, but has been kept alive for half a century or more by people pushing it do the limits. Despite being fairly impractical for primary transportation and I tried for a while as a teenager.
I'm not sure if segways are the best for this, but I bet with some effort, they could have created a small market there that would probably still be popular.
On that note though, I do still see a fair amount of people riding devices clearly inspired by the segway, those handle-less varieties and other gyroscope balanced things and such. So, I think they're not dead so much as they've evolved and the concept of 'personal electric vehicle' has grown beyond what the segway originally was.
I do feel like the electric vehicle future they marketed is coming, they're just not the leaders they told us they'd be and instead of one strange new thing, we've got a variety of things now and on the horizon.
Never seen a segway advert, so I never really got an elitist vibe from them (although I did see one for a similar product marketed at kids called a dareway - it was this kind of standing Davros chair thing that balanced on two drive wheels and a number of hidden casters).
They were especially great in hilly Rome. We hit all the major spots within a few hours. Cruising around the Circus was pretty cool!
But -- we all had minor falls at some point. Cobble-stone streets are not to be messed with!
It's the last place on earth I would consider getting on a Segway with the speed/mess of traffic I encountered.
Even riding a bus felt like a serious gamble.
All in all, the Segway tours were a really great way to see a lot of things you don't normally see at Disney. I would totally recommend taking the tour if they still offered it.
Also http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...
Was really baffling to me at the time how they had such amazing PR.
Dean Kamen, the inventor of the artificial kidney, was also the Segway inventor.
He did a press tour calling it "IT" and spouting nonsense.
The day of the unvealing, everybody was like, "How is that supposed to revolutionize transportation? I like my car better."
I never got on one because I could see a high probability of accidents, and that turned out to be an understatement.
Edit: I lie! I once saw it used by a kids' magician at a birthday party. Pretty marginal use, too.
Again, that they are going out of production shows that they are definitely not bigger than the internet. But they certainly aren't vaporware or even a failed product. Someone somewhere made a profit, and someone somewhere got non-zero utility out of it
Before it was revealed, I remember reading an article where the author said something like, "we're pretty sure it's a 2 wheeled electric scooter that self corrects it's balance."
I remember thinking "this doesn't seem worthy of the hype."
That being said, even though it didn't revolutionize transportation, its use was certainly more widespread than I had expected.
We have made amazing technological leaps in the last 20 years, but you don't have to go far searching Hacker News to find articles complaining about evolutionary progress instead of revolutionary.
I wonder what Gen Z thinks about technological progress. As a millennial that straddled the analog-digital divide, I took huge leaps of progress for granted. My friends and I compared American and Soviet fighter jets, we compared horsepower in muscle cars, we compared specs on processors. We also tinkered with everything, and nearly every system could be easily understood by poking at the internals. Now, what's the point?
Anyway, that's a long way of saying that the Segway hype is a generational thing, I don't think we'll ever see anything like that again.
Those years before the digital transition held a lot of optimism and general hype around what the future would bring. The lack of constant media stimulus also let imaginations run wild. It reminds me of the fantastical predictions of the 70s with jet cars and robot maids.
It seems like the stupid hype over it killed the product when they revealed it was just some boring gadget on wheels...
talk about hype!
>This mysterious invention, reportedly created by National Medal of Technology Award winner, Dean Kamen, is on everyone's lips and has captured everyone's imaginations.
[0] : https://web.archive.org/web/20010220161915/http://theitquest...
I remember reading about its launch on mass consumer internet. (Why do I feel like people place the date for the start of mass consumer internet too late?) Here is a contemporaneous article from Time Magazine's website, which is a pretty mainstream, mass consumer publication: http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,...
In 2001 people still had dialup with AOL CDs. ISDN was the expensive corporate line. DSL was the fancy new broadband. Palm Pilot's and other mobile organizers were still common. Constant internet everywhere you go didn't exist.
I think my first wifi gear was ~1 year after that. Orinoco chipset. That was a bit ahead of most people at that time though.
But yes, this part wasn't there:
> Constant internet everywhere you go didn't exist.
Thouse b-list journalists don't wine and dine themselves.
I mean, remember the hyperloop? It solves a different transportation problem, but there are many parallels. When you take the time to think about it you can see that it doesn't really add up, but man if it could it could be amazing.
Really?? We've had stand-up electric scooters since 1915: https://mashable.com/2015/06/15/1916-suffragette-scooter/
Honestly, it just felt like a ton of tech circle-jerking to me. The gyroscope system on the Segway was really cool, but it was like once it got some good words from some tech luminaries like Steve Jobs, all these other people were like trying to one-up each other saying how revolutionary it was. When it finally came out it was pretty much universally ridiculed by every average joe (not so much ridiculed for what it was, which was a neat scooter, but ridiculed for its unwarranted hype).
Yeah it was funny. It hit so far below the hype expectations, many (myself included) thought the Segway wasn't even "IT", expecting the real announcement to come later.
Their tech got a lot of PR hype but the actual product didn’t get nearly enough hype to sell it to their potential customers.
A bunch of dotcom royalty were exuberant over it and so the rest of us wanted to at least know what all the fuss was about.
Then I think we saw the price and went back to yearning for a slightly used Aeron chair.
I remember back thinking the only market was government, there were references to the ADA in the article as well.
The hype was UNREAL.
They liquidated all their inventory months ago.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/steve-jobs-and-jeff-bezos-meet...
Sorry, that version of the story is paywalled. Other versions discuss Steve Jobs’ views on the early Segway:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2010/09/27/steve...
https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-segway-technol...
Back when they came out I too was affected by the hype and wanted to get one - until I saw the price and said "never mind".
Drop the price to 1/10 of the amount, to $500, and it would still be expensive, but at least there's something to talk about there. At $5000 it was an easy decision not to get it.
Apart from how terrible the attitude of “we should have made the product more disposable to milk more cash out of the only people who bought it, creating a lot more e-waste in the process” is, do they really think that people would have kept buying them if they kept breaking?
Disagree. I wouldn't buy one if they were one-tenth the price (and I think that sentiment would be shared by many people). The real reason is that it was and is a stupid product, even if some of the technology involved was innovative.
I think they had a brilliant idea, they were too early to the market, over marketed and then simply priced themselves out of contention. I’ll never understand why they didn’t have a cost reduced model
It would rise up on two wheels and balance so the rider was eye level with standing people. And it would go up and down stairs. Truly amazing IMO.
https://msu.edu/~luckie/segway/iBOT/iBOT.html
Totally unrelated I am now 35 and feel completely unfulfilled in life when I look at everything Kamen does. I would love to work at a full time research institute experimenting and innovating.
Then it actually launched and everyone had a disappointed “that's it?” I actually would not have predicted that it would take until 2020 to fold.
"Segway" is a brand that has passed through several hands after Dean Kaman sold it a while back.
This sounds to me like the New Hampshire plant is no longer going to manufacture Segway units, rather than the technology being discontinued altogether.
Ninebot of China acquired Segway and uses the IP to defend their self-balancing inventions.
https://time.com/3822962/segway-ninebot-china/
It looks like ninebot still produces the Segway in China, and I don't imagine will stop soon.
https://www.segway.com/professionals
Company was bought and many of the great patent technology has been put to good use.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/30/tech/segway-history/index.htm...
I still think the main news here is just that the legacy Segway PT unit is being discontinued, along with the US manufacturing facilities in New Hampshire, where it doesn't make sense for a Chinese company to be manufacturing.
Seems to me like Mark Wilson of Fast company is trying to make a bigger story out of that, when I'm not sure there is one.
Fast Company has learned that the Segway brand will retire the last Segway as we know it, the Segway PT. Manufacturing at the Bedford, New Hampshire, plant will stop July 15
They were great because staff could save tons of time running back to the production area or warehouse. Maintenance had the models with tool bags on the sides.
They were very expensive to repair, and had lots of quirks that needed firmware updates and such.
We got acquired and the new parent company wouldn’t take the liability, so I had to pallet them up and sell the whole lot on eBay.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway_polo#Woz_Cup
Now I've got a friend trying to convince me to buy a OneWheel. I just can't justify $1500 for a weird skateboard when I could literally order an electric car on Alibaba for that much money.
I figure between legs, bikes, cars, trains and planes, we've pretty much got transportation solved. Segway tried to solve what bikes solved a hundred years earlier. But bikes are less expensive, are also really fun, and are great exercise.
I've rode inline skates to work, ride kick scooter and bicycle. But it was Heelys stop from 5 km/s to 0 face down on asphalt that was the worst. Quick change of direction - from forward to into the ground. Too quick for brain but hands took part of the momentum. Palms heart, it would be unfortunate to be programmer with broken palms, I was lucky. Stay safe.
I fully agree with whoever told you that the automatic braking is dangerous on downhills, that has been the source of all my scariest Onewheel moments and now I don't go above 10-12 mph when riding downhill, which of course is much slower than a safe downhill speed on a regular bike.
And for example kick scooter is not that safe. Inline skates on the same speed gives much more control. Bicycle is yet safer.
I like the idea - should be fun to ride, I do not like product placement.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNqOU4jx62I
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys3ivCUxIvY