At least 4 deaths and numerous injuries. The recall is going to install upgraded software that buzzes to warn riders.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/01/us/onewheel-electric-skateboard-recall-deaths/index.html
Hmm.
4 deaths over a 2 year period ending 2 years ago and just now first the government and now the manufacturer decide to take action. Seems … tardy. It might well be an overreaction in terms of raw numbers, but it seems real late in terms of timing.
I see a bunch of those things around here. Which look like fun. And substantially zero of the riders I see of anything skateboard-like use helmets.
But a 20+ mph unicycle with a rather small diameter tire sure looks like it could be prone to sudden stoppage with the rider bucked off face first. Whether due to abrupt failure, hitting what looks like a tolerable bit of road debris that isn’t, or just flat losing balance / control and running into whatever. Plus of course the excellent and highly aware car drivers we all know are everywhere.
I had a OneWheel. Learned I am too old for it. Wrenched my shoulder pretty good on a fall. No need for a doctor or hospital visit but it was sore for many months.
I sold it after that.
It’s a cool machine but it requires a fair bit of practice and good balance to use well.
It did have a point where it could throw you if you got outside of its performance parameters.
I am on the fence though whether that should be a recall issue. All machines have performance limits and, if you get outside of those limits, bad things can happen. And not wearing a helmet (at the least) is 100% on the user. I have little sympathy for those who refuse to wear a helmet.
ATGATT (All the Gear, All The Time)
His ATTGAT is missing the full leather jacket & boots not sneakers. But I get and agree with your the point.
And the device he’s showcasing is probably far less spill-prone than a Onewheel. Probably.
I’d add elbow pads too but a full leather jacket might suffice.
And I forget what that gizmo he is standing next to is called but I have seen some videos of nasty spills off those too. Definitely want protection when riding.
I jumped off my motorcycle doing 70+ on the freeway. Only damage was a quarter-sized shallow abrasion on the heel of one palm. No gloves, but otherwise pro-quality leather head to toe. And full coverage helmet.
Conveniently I was 20 or 21, so I bounced and rolled successfully to a halt. I would not like my odds doing it that well again then, much less now.
ATTGAT FTW.
I haven’t tried a OneWheel, but I did try to learn a self-balancing unicycle like that, and couldn’t pick it up. The problem is that there’s no left-right stability at all, so you have to have some certain forward speed to remain upright (like a bicycle, except that for a bicycle the speeds are much lower and it’s easy to put your feet down). A OneWheel has a much fatter tire, with a very shallow curve (more like a car tire than a motorcycle tire), and it’s possible to just balance in place. The OneWheel looks much easier to learn, IMO, though with the high speeds possible it could be more dangerous overall.
In one of the most bizarre cases of inappropriate ad placement I’ve ever experienced, I was just reading an article about the OneWheel recall on the CNN website, and in the middle of the page there was an ad for … OneWheel skateboards.
Bizarre and hence entertaining to humans, but straightforwardly obvious to a mindless keyword-matching algorithm. Next year the shiny new AI algorithm will do much better. Instead it will place an ad for a competitor’s electric skateboard / unicycle / fall-off-get-hurt product. 
Ain’t progress wonderful?!?
Is it possible that’s how long it took for lawsuits to get wrapped up? Also, looking at the recall itself, it was issued last November. For whatever reason CNN published that article today.
I’m interested to see if Adam Savage talks about this. He talks about his quite a bit. From the sounds of it, if you leave near his house or ‘the cave’, seeing him zipping around the neighborhood isn’t an uncommon sight. In fact, he even has a video on modding his One Wheel and another video at the factory where they make one.
From my quick reading of their wiki page, their fastest model tops out at 20mph.
It seems like a large inflated tire like that would allow it to gain very high speeds going down a hill and, because it is inflated, it would tend to bounce when hitting bumps, which makes it even harder to control. No thanks, I’ll stick to my bike for non-motorized transportation. I don’t even like the standard skateboards much less this design.
My grocery store already does that. If you buy a pack of Pepsi it prints out a coupon for Coca Cola… The same for many name brand items that have obviously paid for this service.
At the time OneWheel was released electric skateboards were the thing. They’d go pretty fast and had good range. The problem was, little wheels and an uncomfortable ride. Even tiny sidewalk cracks could be an issue for them and, certainly, felt when riding.
The OneWheel was better at dealing with sidewalk cracks (within reason) and its inflatable, rubber tire meant a much better ride.
But, it is a difficult machine to master. Electric skateboards needed some skill, OneWheel needed a lot more. And, if you exceeded some performance parameters on the OneWheel it’d just stop (but you would not which meant you flew head-first off the board in most case…some nimble people might have run it out without falling but for most it would be a wipeout…probably onto pavement).
Any vehicle has inherent dangers…even a bicycle or normal skateboard. A helmet is the bare minimum of gear needed to ride one.
Total hijack, but … whyyyyyy?!
I ran over a large piece of metal laying in my lane that I did not see due to a combo of shade from an overpass, sun in my eyes, and non-descript color. I basically got bucked off the bike as it jumped upwards and the handlebars were wrenched from my grip.
I would expect / hope that the thing would have some softer failure modes where, e.g. if you got going too fast on a downhill it’d dynamic brake itself gently to a safer speed, rather than simply freezing the drive motor.
Obviously dynamic braking only has as much capacity as it does, and that can be overcome by a too-steep slope. But to not even try for gentle rather than brick-wall responses to out-of-parameters ops or failures seems … sloppy enough workmanship as to constitute negligence.
Only the newer models will get the upgrade & I wonder if you’ll get the “haptic buzz” in time to correct your actions of if it comes < 1/4 second before one becomes a very-low-orbit astronaut so by the time your brain processes it, let alone corrects you have already been involuntarily separated from the board
Even when people are wearing a helmet, they’re very rarely one with any facial protection
In my one motorcycle wreck that involved another vehicle, this was what happened to me. I was going about 30 MPH and a car pulled out perpendicularly directly in front of me. I swerved to go behind the car, as I was braking hard, but couldn’t avoid the rear panel of the car. My motorcycle “bucked” me off. I landed on my feet and ran it out and didn’t have a scratch on me. The same could not be said for my motorcycle.
Young teen on their phone.
I lost it delivering papers on ice. I thought I was stopped, but when I let go the Honda and I had very different momentum sliding across the iced street.
Here is my pathetic, slow speed vehicle knowledge. For several years I have been using those electric shoppers at the grocery store because of my knee problems. If you let go of the throttle some of them do a very quick but controlled stop. But if you do that on some others, or hit a small bump, or lean forward enough to trip the seat switch, Hell comes to breakfast! I have almost bumped my nose on the packages.
Further reinforcing my guess that people who design these things don’t ride them enough to see what can happen.
Not surprising actually. But sad.
My late aged MIL used a power chair like this to get around. Pride Jazzy 600 ES Power Wheelchair – SpinLife.
The controls are an on/off button, a knob, and joystick. The knob adjusts the maximum speed up or down from barely creeping to jogging speed. Once the knob is set wherever the joystick controls rotation left / right and forward / aft motion. More stick displacement = more speed. Pretty simple and intuitive to use. But …
The designers had built a sizeable time delay in between the time the joystick is moved and the machine responds. Doubtless designed with elderly thinking / reaction times in mind. And probably also designed to ignore brief inputs as just oafish bumping of the controls, not an actual command for motion.
I had to move this thing fairly often for her. Sometimes standing alongside, sometimes sitting in it myself. As a late 50s to mid 60yo of normal health & speed the thing was almost undriveable. Even knowing the lag was there it was very very difficult to put in the input, wait for the reaction, then adjust and wait again.
Doubtless I would have gotten better at it if I was using it all day. As I someday may well have to do for realsies. But if I was the UI design team I sure would have put in another knob, even if it was a hidden one, to adjust the delay to suit the user.