Wow, yeah, tough crowd in this thread. My girlfriend and I once did a Segway tour in downtown Dallas, once throughout Washington DC, and once throughout the Fisherman’s Wharf area of San Francisco. Had a great time each time.
I don’t know of any “cities that are designed around them” but once you got a knack for riding them I thought they were a fun way to kill a couple of hours.
I’ve seen a handful or people who rented them in cities wipe out in some truly gruesome ways. I’m a little surprised this isn’t a profitable business if only for novelty purposes. Seems like lots of worse ideas have been able to carve out a profitable niche.
There aren’t any. But Steve Jobs thought there would be.
Many of those people were bitterly disappointed when it turned out be a self-balancing scooter.
What did they imagine it to be at the time, then? AFAIK that is always what it was described and billed as. An electric powered, environmentally friendly “personal mobility device” that, well, scoot people around, but with a ground footprint only slightly bigger than a person would be, and no steering apparatus - just using weight shifting to move around in an intuitive and natural way. There was a handlebar, mainly to hold on to, and also for speed/throttle control with a twisty-wristy interface. Oh, and it could climb and descend stairs and ramps safely.
I’ve never actually used one myself so I don’t know how well if fulfills all those functions, but from what I’ve seen it does. It was just priced too high to become a ubiquitous appliance kind of thing.
Also, I think the range between charges was only around 10-15 miles, meaning it could never be used to commute to work for the vast majority of Americans (only those living and working in a dense urban area), while still being impractical for daily life like shopping for stuff, as illustrated in this video.
Believe it or not a few people thought it might be a personal flying device…
They wete banned from streets, and then they were banned from sidewalks. After that, I was surprised they hunh on as long as they did.
It must have been a crushing disappointment to its creators, who must have once thought the Segway was going to be as big as the iPhone.
It’s just the upright high control model that’s being discontinued. The knee and scooter versions continue.
I would say the vision of the product made it and is alive and well today, though that particular implementation didn’t. It may have been just too early in the production/technology for that product to become mainstream and was larger and clunkier then today’s version of a product that was designed to solve the ‘last mile’ problem in transportation. However in use e-scooters and e-bikes many that are app rentable per use usually seen in cities is what the Segway was trying to be.
a local place used to do tours of historic sites with them but I think that stopped a while back. I saw a cop at the airport with one 2 years ago.
I don’t know if you remember but before the product was revealed to the public, we only heard completely overblown statements about it. We had no idea what this thing was going to be. I think that level of hype hurt the thing in the end.
As for the end of production, by now most of the relevant patents are expired, so if anyone wants to, they could make and sell similar products, and probably for less money.
I vaguely remember that, but also that I tuned it out because speculating on what a completely unknown but “I promise it, this is world-changing!” new product would be, even flush in the waning days of the dot-com era of supreme tech exuberance, was pointless. If it was so world-changing a premise, why be so secretive about it?
The bit about thinking it might be “OMG jet packs!” does ring a bell, though. So I think it was already leaked to be something involving “personal mobility”. And I do remember having a literally laugh-out-loud moment when it was shown to be what looked like a horizontally arranged electric scooter that would apparently replace walking around.
I understand there is already a replacement for the Segway.
I remember thinking at the time it came out, “Great. As if people don’t avoid walking enough.”
I needn’t have worried.
But people still don’t walk enough, including me.
All I can think of when I hear Segway is that time George W. fell off his.
Heh. Parts are cheaper, too.
My father had two of those. After his spinal stenosis operation he could stand OK but he couldn’t walk very far, so it was better for him to do his errands on the Segway than in his car, because he could ride the thing into and around the stores and he didn’t have to walk at all. He had a first generation one, where you lean your body the way you want to go, but that one eventually developed problems, so he got a 2nd generation one, where you stand erect and just move the stalk the way you want to go. His muscle memory kept wanting to operate it the old way, and he fell off a few times, was never injured but he had to call the EMTs to help him up. He lived in a suburban area which is what made this all possible. So this is kind of a niche usage, but it really helped him out.
So, Segwaying while vaping would be Mondo Dorkness.
For anyone who missed the months of clues and hype, it was a delicious secret (like McCartney’s death and replacement). Some, like me, believed it could be something revolutionary … hence the crushing letdown when it was revealed… do read that Guardian article that Darren linked to:
Months of selectively drip-fed rumours and bold claims from some of the most celebrated technology luminaries fuelled the gossip, making Project Ginger the most hyped product since the launch of the Apple MacIntosh.
Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, predicted that in future cities would be designed around the device, while Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, also backed the project publicly and financially…
The Harvard Business School Press reportedly signed a $250,000 contract with Mr Kamen for the book about Mr Segway’s development without even knowing what it was.
… The inventor again took the opportunity to up the hyperbole ante. Using the scooter, he said, was like slipping on a pair of “magic sneakers”.
“All the knowledge that went into knowing how to walk goes into this machine,” he continued. “It kind of walks for you.”But among those who have followed Ginger’s development most closely, the response was distinctly muted. Although most technology devotees knew Ginger was a scooter, many had expected it at least to have a revolutionary power source, running on a highly efficient Stirling engine, perhaps, or using hydrogen propulsion."
Better yet if you played the glockenspiel at the same time.
Well bummer. I have fantasized for years about having the spare cash to buy one for around-the-town jaunts. I’ve ridden them a handful of times, and they feel a lot safer than one of those electric scooters.
I tried one of those last year (there are a lot of “dockless scooter” companies operating in DC) and that was terrifying. Those tiny little wheels on rough sidewalks were a tumble waiting to happen. Anyone watching me would have known that the expression on my face was not a gleeful grin, but a grimace of terror. Braking was frightening too - it seemed entirely too likely that I’d brake the front wheel first, thereby causing the laws of physics to take over.