Hoverboards seem to be have about the biggest sales this Christmas, right up there with drones. After hearing about the fires and seeing all the emergency room visits on the news I would suspect that the company is headed to Law Suit City. Ah. the joys of being a personal injury lawyer. For them it could be the gift that keeps on giving.
Yes! This is the same situation that put bicycles, ice skates, roller blades, and skateboards out of business.
I can see that law suits are bound to happen with the fire issue. But injury law suits?
This morning on the local news they did a report on yet another hoverboard “victim”. This (50ish )dude was showing his scars from the 100k + surgery he had as a result of a fall, while complaining that the manufacturer didn’t provide enough safety warnings :smack:
“Victim” my ass. On the other hand, I heard but did not see Mike Tyson busting his ass on one and by the sound of it he was cracking up. I think if you use one of these things you’d better be prepared to fall down and/ or spontaneously combust and you you’d better have a sense of humor about yourself.
Apparently, a lot of people have been getting hurt falling off them. Which makes sense if you think about it: It’s basically what you would get if Segway tried to re-invent the skateboard.
Speaking of Segway, so far I see these things going down the same path: A fad that will be popular for about a year, before fading into a geeky niche product that everyone makes fun of.
After watching a few videos, I see the inherent flaw in the device. For illustrative purposes, let’s compare a Segway PT with a Hoverboard. Both are self-balancing machines, but with an important difference that manifests when you start to fall backward:
[ul][li]Segway: when you start to fall unexpectedly backward, your instinctive reaction is to pull the handlebars back with you. This tilts the Segway backward, and the automatic self-balancing system will then accelerate the scooter backward, pushing it back under you. Assuming you’re on smooth ground with good traction, and never let go of the handlebars, it’s virtually impossible to fall backwards off of a Segway.[/li]
[*]Hoverboard: when you start to fall unexpectedly backward, you don’t have anything to grab with your hands. Your instinctive reaction is to push off with your feet, to try to get your feet back under you. This means you extend your feet/point your toes. This tilts the hoverboard forward, and the machine’s response is to accelerate forward, scooting it out from under you. The more it scoots out from under you, the more you panic and point your toes to try to push your legs back under you, and in a heartbeat this positive-feedback cycle results in the hoverboard literally pulling your feet out from under you and dumping you violently on your ass. This can happen in a linear, straight-back fashion, or in a rapid spin if you only have one foot extending/pointing.[/ul] Watch a few hoverboard crash videos, and pay attention to victims’ feet. You can wear a helmet and elbow/knee pads, but unless the manufacturer advises people to wear a leather motorcycle racing suit with a full suite of impact-resistant body armor, people are going to fuck up their spines and hips when these hoverboards suddenly spin them off or jet out from under them.
They should get sued because the boards don’t hover. I did see yesterday an announcement about a real hoverboard. The thing is full of batteries and runs a bunch of electric fans that produce enough thrust to get the thing off the ground with someone on it for about 6 minutes.
<Seinfeld> Oh yea, I like this idea
First, there’s a lot of different “hoverboard” manufacturers (so there’s no singular “the company”), and since its so popular, a whole lot of chinese knock-offs. If you buy the cheapo half-the-price-of-everyone-else hoverboard made with very little oversight and churned out to chumps, yeah, you’re probably going to get a fire. You get what you pay for.
Now we’ll have the added bonus of vertical height, meaning people will fall farther before hitting the ground, likely adding neck injuries into the mix.
I don’t think any of these things are any more dangerous than skateboards. The difference is that the people riding them think they are safe.
A 15 year old in London lost control and died under a bus just before Christmas my thoughts and prayers are with his family
I was watching some youtube videos of the hoverboards and saw people using them next to all sorts of things which would be hazardous to fall into: glass doors, picket fences, glass tables, bookshelves, etc. So not only will someone be injured from the fall itself, they’ll likely have greater injuries from falling onto something or pulling something down onto themselves.
Close; they’re all Chinese knock offs, but that raises the question – if they’re all knock offs, are any of the knock offs? There was nothing to knock off in the first place, so…
Planet Money covered this last month.
In my experience, they cost somewhere in the range of $250-$350, but the early imports were all sold at massive markups, giving rise to this illusion that some are somehow more “legit” than others.
What? No. There are absolutely identifiable, distinct companies making different products in the hoverboard market. That have logos, quality control, and everything. It’s just the chinese knockoffs of these products that are going unbranded and have poor quality checks. While I didn’t watch your link, it has typed out falsehoods right there on the starting page. Swagway and AirWheel are both examples of individual companies marketing their own models. With branding and everything.
Hoverboards started being produced by Chinese companies earlier this year (or last year, but I didn’t see one until sometime in the spring), and unbranded models started making their way over to the states shortly thereafter. It’s only after they became a thing, something cool that someone would show up to work with and everyone had to try, that importers decided to come up with brands and logos to slap on bulk orders from alibaba.
That’s not to say that they don’t have quality control, or that their aren’t some manufacturers that are reputable (or more reputable than others). It’s just that this is a somewhat unique product in the way it’s grown out of the manufacturing sector of China somewhat organically. There’s no reason to think that Swagway or Airwheel have any more interest in QC than any other importer buying off alibaba. It’s all covered in the podcast, I wish I had a transcript for you.
Here you go. Just before he falls one of his kids says, “Daddy I don’t want you to fall.” He lands flat on his back but it was onto a rug.
Yeah, I think I’ll wait until they come with training wheels (which I would probably never remove). Fortunately for me, I’m still several years behind the curve on the “hot-toy-for-Christmas” chart.
I’m hoping to score a Cabbage Patch Kid for my daughter next year. She’ll be twenty years old.
Was she even alive when cabbage patch dolls were a thing?
We don’t claim they’re knock-offs when Kingston literally just buys Sandisk microSD cards and rebrands them with their logo. Or when Netgear just buys whatever chip is cheap on the market that month and slap it into their products. When Kenmore dishwashers are really made by Whirlpool and rebranded. This is par for the course on stuff made in China. Which is just about everything.
What makes the big difference between these products is both the quality control and customer service. The big hoverboard companies supply exactly that. An electronic item with selected top-quality parts is never the same as the one bought for bottom dollar, even if it looks the same on the outside.
And for the record, AirWheel does have a totally different design than everyone else 
I was talking to a friend of mine at the gym today. She mentioned that her 50-year-old brother broke his arm on Christmas riding his new “Hoverboard.” When they went to the emergency room, the doctor looked at him and said “Hoverboard?” He said yes, and she replied “Fifth one today!”