The Segway, Five Years Later

abb_road writes "The Segway was introduced with a promise to transform cities; BusinessWeek has an article on what the Segway has accomplished in 5 years, and how 'personal transportation,' and the company, have changed. From the article: 'The first Segway — a clean-running, technologically dumbfounding, fun-as-hell-to-ride device that was pretty much impossible to fall off of — was introduced to so much fanfare five years ago that the public-relations agency that helped engineer it still uses it as a case study in how to create a media frenzy. It may be an even better case study in media backlash. The initial euphoria had hardly worn off before a new consensus emerged: This was all much ado about a $5,000 scooter.'"

What they've accomplished: Not Much

[WoodstockJeff]

If the article is all there is on this subject, then Segway hasn't accomplished much since the scooter was finished. They've thought about a lot of potentially neat things, but they're still just that - thoughts.

Makes me want to run right out and put all my money into just about anything except Segway!

The Hype!

[ferrellcat]

Does everyone else remember the hype that swirled before the release of the Segway?

Ginger!

IT!

A device so revolutionary and world-changing, that its codename was "IT"!!!

After seeing it, Jeff Bezos was known to say "You have a product so revolutionary, you'll have no problem selling it."

Bidders paid out over $100,000 EACH for the first three examples of a production Segway.

Well, we all know how it went from there.

I want to thank Dean Kamen for permanently calibrating my expectations when it comes to new world-changing products.

I'm much less excitable about such claims now.

Ultimate Problem: Too Expensive

[Bigboote66]

Like the article says, a $5000 scooter. There are electric scooters out there that could also be carried onto a subway car with you, but they're 1/20th the price [google.com]. Sure, they don't have the same range, or cool factor, but who the heck did Kamen think his market was? We're talking about a device to make it easier for people to get from public transportation hubs to their destination endpoints. These aren't the kind of people that have $5000 to waste on a personal transporter. You're talking about 10 years of bus transfers before it pays for itself.

I live about a mile from nearby subway stations, and have been known to be an early adopter - a perfect candidate for a Segway (other than the fact that I'm not sure about it's viability in Boston winter conditions). I told myself that I'd buy one once they got down to about $1500. Well, it's five years later and the price hasn't budged. If they really wanted to change the world, they would have figured out a way to sell them for $1000.

-BbT

Re:The segway has a perfect market

[DrXym]

Exactly. Segways have a genuine use for people who spend their lives going back and forth for their work, e.g. warehouse operators. These environments can be appropriately signposted and controlled by health and safety rules.

The same is not true of a pavement. All you expect on a pavement are people using their legs and occasional wheelchair users. Unless there is something wrong with you, you should not be permitted to operate any kind of vehicle including a Segway on the path. Take your chances on the road or walk like everybody else.

A few points

[Otter]

• This thing was *so* ludicrously overhyped that there was no way it couldn't be a disappointment. That it turned out to be classic "good advertising kills a bad product" was icing on the cake.
• Somebody here hit it right on the nose five years ago -- during the dot-com boom there were rich stupid dorks with money to spend on something like this. But not in 2001.
• Five years later, I've never seen one in person, and I live in one of the two or three most tech-heavy cities in the world. The Segway may well be fun, but it doesn't look at all fun to me in pictures and the company has never bothered to market them intensively enough to show me otherwise.
• As skeptics pointed out from day one, the Segway has no advantage for commuting or transportation over cheaper, simpler existing devices (feet, bicycles, handicapped scooters) in real-world situations.

I am come Price, destroyer of new worlds.

[hey!]

If the Segway was introduced at $500 instead of $5000, it would have changed the world. Technologially, there doesn't seem to be anything about these things that absolutely prevent them being made at a marginal cost of less than $500, given enough unit sales to amortize fixed costs and manufacturing investments over. Which really means if you had an infinite amount of investment money and unlimited time to recoup it in, eventually you would recoup it. Which is not saying much at all. The Apple Newton would have changed the world if it had been introduced at $100 instead of $1000, and there is little reason to think that we could not, today, produce them for less than that.

It seems to me that changing the way people move in and out of cities is a catch-22 phenomenon. No matter how compatible your new idea is with existing modes of transportation (which the Segway, in truth, was not), you need the city to provide infrastructure before it will be widely adopted. And cities won't provide infrastructure until there is widespread adoption. The only way around this is to price the thing at a level where a lot of people will simply say "what the hell" and start using them, creating a problem that cities have to respond to. People are so much better at responding to problems than planning.

Truthfully, cities don't make more than token concessions to bikes, which compared to supporting Segways are much simpler to accomodate. Some cities even don't seem to give a damn about pedestrians. The only way to change this is the same way that automakers killed public transit: be willing to lose a lot of money in order to make not using your product inconvenient for people.

9/11 Effect?

[Schnapple]

The Segway was unveiled in December, 2001, meaning it was a scant three months and change after 9/11. I've always thought that something that hurt the Segway in the marketplace was the fact that here was the USA (where the thing was unveiled, invented, target market, etc.) recovering from its worst attack in history (terrorist or otherwise), the economy is in the shitter, and here's some eccentric genius trying to get everyone excited about a $5,000 scooter.

Perhaps the Segway would have met the same "meh" fate either way but does anyone think that, had 9/11 never happened, the Segway would have met a better response?

I had/have a number of issues with the segway

[manno]

1. It's not clean running. just because it's electric does not mean it's "clean" there's a smokestack/nuclear plant/mam somewhere charging its batteries. And it is SIGNIFICANTLY less clean that walking.

2. The biggest issue I have though is why encourage people to get less exercise than they get already? This has bugged me since I read the first over-hyped preview of the Segue. People should be encouraged to walk. Not to drop 5g's so every form of exercise they can possibly get should be removed from their life. My sister used to live in Atlanta and she told me it was the most obese city in the US. They say it's because you need to drive to get anywhere in the city. She put on 15lbs. in a year when she lived there. She moved to NYC and she dropped that 15lbs. and then some. Even with the Atlanta she had a fairly slender frame, after she had lived in NYC for about a year though she was the lightest I've ever seen her.

3. and this one is very big a Segue takes up a lot more space than a person. Mostly because it's shape is static. I used to have a lot of house parties, and the place would get PACKED I'm not a small man in any sense of the word at the time I was playing rugby, lifting and was 6'4" and 240lbs and despite everyone being packed so tight it was a struggle to stretch you nose I could still get from one end of the house to the other. replace pedestrians with Segues, and you'll just end up with segue gridlock.

The thing is doomed to a niche always was always will. It's not a mass market idea.

Last time I recall the Segway on Slashdot...

[StressGuy]

I made a post that, in order for it to be successful, it must do the following.

1) Be an order of magnitude cheaper

2) Break down into a package small and light enough to carry on public transportation

Otherwise, it's just an expensive glorified electric scooter

I stand by my original accessment...

Re:Cities redesigned

[atokata]

..but, think about the logistics of standing upright for 150 miles, at 12.5MPH. By my math, that'd be a twelve hour journey. Hope you're not trying to carry a heavy backpack the whole way.

Re:Case study?

[tgeller]

Segway was inarguably a P.R. success. Public Relations doesn't control market acceptance, only market exposure. And they got that, in spades.

Re:Case study?

[Moofie]

Seems to me like the only valuable thing for a PR firm to do would be to set peoples' expectations. If you overpromise and underdeliver, that's bad PR.

my main issue with the segway:

[imsabbel]

Standing on a spot for a longer time is actually LESS comfortable than walking around.

I would rather walk than stand put on that little platform, as is.
if it were twice as fast, then it would make sense (but than again, its autostabilisation would crap its virutal pants when dealing with 4 times the kinetic energy).

I met one once in real live, and while it was faster than walking pace, i could effortlessly drive a lot faster on a bike (which is cheaper, has "unlimited range", a physical autostabilisation called "rotational inertia" and light enough to just pick up and carry up some stairs)

For those who do not want to RFTA

[Hercules Peanut]

The Segway is a solution looking for a problem.

Well, that's the real life test, right there

[Moraelin]

Even so, I would love to have one and I imagine most people would. I just wouldn't want to pay for it!

Well, see, that IRL is actually the whole issue and measure of a product's worth: whether you'd pay the price for it, or not.

Because if we're talking as in "well, if it was free of charge, I'd get one", then you've covered pretty much everything in that category. I know wouldn't refuse a lot of things, if they were free, even if they're bloody stupid and/or I have no intention of using them more than once or twice. But if they cost 0$, hey, I can just chuck it in the garbage bin later and I've lost nothing, right?

The problem is that IRL most things aren't free, and bang/buck is actually a very important criterion. There's a moment when you look at a toy and at it's price tag, and decide, "gee, it would be bloody _stupid_ to pay _that_ much for that." And many a product ends up a dud not because it's a stupid product per se, but because it's just not worth the price tag it comes with.

And that's where the Segway failed. You're not the only one who wouldn't mind one for free. I wouldn't either. I don't think much of it as a means of transportation, but, hey, it might make a good high-tech toy to play once or twice with. But when you slap a $5000 price tag on that toy, it start's looking like a stupid toy for people with more money than brains. I could even afford that price very easily, but looking at it from a bang-per-buck perspective, it's entirely too little bang for that kind of buck. I can easily think a _lot_ of other stuff to blow my money on, that would be more useful, fun, or whatever.

Re:The segway has a perfect market

[zippthorne]

Indeed. "Too fat to walk" is not a disability that should be treated with a device that further reduces exercise.

Re:The Segway

[bigtrike]

Why do you need all that fuel anyways? Moving around a 2000lb vehicle with over a million parts which requires 50 square feet of paved space everywhere you take it is not a great solution to get a 150lb occupant from one place to another.

Even if there was a better fuel, the motor vehicle is still one of the worst possible solutions to the problem. The segway is not a great replacement as it doesn't provide protection from the elements. Even then, a $300 bicycle is much faster than a segway and much cheaper to own and operate.

k.i.s.s.

Re:The Segway

[agallagh42]

The segway is a neat idea for a scooter, although it's a little expensive for what you get. It is by no means any kind of replacement for cars, even in an urban environment. There's two key features of cars that you'll never be able to implement on this kind of transportation device:

1. Climate control. Even as simple as a roof and windows to keep out the rain, and a heater to keep out the cold. A $500 used Civic has that. The $5000 Segway does not.

2. Secure storage. ie. a lockable trunk to store your stuff. Sure, it's not perfect, but in most areas you can reasonably sure your bags will still be in your trunk when you get back to wherever you parked it.

So definitely not a car replacement. What Kamen should have been comparing it to was the bicycle. Unfortunately, the price/performance ratio still just doesn't add up when comparing to a basic $200 bike. You can carry just as much stuff on the bike, go just as fast, with no need to recharge it every night. You might get a little tired or sweaty, but if that's a major problem for you, see the $500 used civic. :)

Re:Cities redesigned

[xtermz]

Philadelphia has many streets designed before cars were around, so the segway is a very good fit. Unfortunately at the price of a small car, most people aren't buying them.

Market a segway for less than 1,000USD and even I'll buy one

Seems like bad PR to me

[Moraelin]

The ultimate purpose of PR or marketting is to sell a product. That's it. That's why we pay those people.

In the over-production economy of today it's damn easy to produce lots of anything, but it's hard to sell it. Insert your favourite product and major corporation manufacturing it, and it would be trivial for them to ramp their production to the point where it exceeds world demand. Nike or Adidas could swamp the world in sports shoes, Samsung could bury the world in TVs, and Coca Cola could easily ramp its production to the point where the whole human species could drink only that. That's not the problem. The problem is selling that stuff.

_That_ is the problem that marketting and PR were supposed to solve. Plain and simple. That's why their clients pay for their services.

A marketting or PR campaign whose backlash actually hurts product sales (e.g., Daikatana and the massive backlash to the "John Romero will make you his bitch" campaign), is plain and simple a flop. I don't know how you want to redefine PR's job, but from the client's point of view, he didn't get _his_ problem solved: selling more products. That's the real problem he had and needed solved. Anything else is just missing the point and solving the wrong problem.

Just exposure is damn easy to get. You only need to fund a spam campaign or something equally stupid, and you'll get all the negative exposure you can possibly hope for. Or get your products to fail in some spectacular way. (Incendiary laptops with Sony batteries, anyone?) That'll get you in everyone's head. But that's not the exposure anyone actually wants.

The trick is getting the kind of exposure that makes people actually want to buy the product. You need to get people to associate product with being cool, trendy, hip, or just having some benefit out of it. Stuff that makes them want to buy product X instead of product Y. (E.g., make them want Coca Cola instead of Pepsi or water from the tap.) That's really what the client pays for, and that's why he pays trained experts instead of just doing some hare-brained publicity stunt himself.

Isolating half of the issue as "only that's my job, and it doesn't involve whether or not it helps you" is missing the point. Saying "my job is to create market awareness, it's not my job whether it also helps your business or kill it" is as stupid as hearing a surgeon say, "well, my job is only to cut you open, not to actually remove your appendix and/or make sure you survive."

Re:The Segway can't replace a car, Part 2...

[WATYF]

...more reasons why it's absurd to suggest that the Segway would be replacing cars (or even bikes/scooters) any time soon (or ever). This, of course, only applies to urban areas... there are other obvious reasons why it's useless outside of a large, dense metropolitan area.

1) You can only transport 1 person on it. Even in the $500 Civic, you'll still probably be able to take your wife/girlfriend and a buddy or two along. With the Segway, you'd have to shell out *another* $5000 for each person who wants to go with. So when you wanna go for a nice Sunday "stroll", or go grab some food a few blocks away, you better hope you like doing it alone. :o)

2) The transportation of even reasonably bulky items isn't possible. Planning on traveling with anything more then the clothes on your back...? Well, the $500 Civic wins that one by a landslide... heck, even the old fashioned scooter (and possibly even a bike) would probably win this one by a good margin.

3) It can't (or most likely "won't") be used to go very far. I think its limit is somewhere between 10 and 20 miles per charge. But more importantly, you're *standing* while you're traveling, so you won't want to go more than a few miles. (Remember, if you weren't interested in being lazy, then you wouldn't have bought a Segway in the first place.) ;o) People who want to exert themselves will walk or use a bike, people who want to relax while traveling will get the $500 Civic.


I honestly think that the Segway (as a whole) is the most impractical invention ever created. I think that the technology behind it is freaking amazing... but unfortunately, they took ground-breaking new tech, and put it in a completely impractical device. There isn't a single thing that a Segway can do that can't be done better and (usually much) cheaper by using other transportation methods that have been around for a hundred (or even thousands of) years. The only scenario I can think of where the practical *function* of a Segway supersedes other methods is for police officers doing day-long foot patrols. But then, the function is the only advantage... when you factor in the cost... it's outrageous. My tax dollars paying $5000 per-person just so cops don't have to walk (God forbid), while they patrol the city?

I think the benefit of a Segway exists only in novelty. It's cool as hell, but not much more can be said than that.


WATYF

Re:Cities redesigned

[fyngyrz]

...only if a canoe was priced 10x higher than any sensible person would consider paying.

Seriously. $5000 ??? $500, sure, $1000 maybe, $1500, probably not. You don't price a machine you want to "revolutionize" transportation at the same cost as a decent motorcycle (or more than a scooter) when you can't offer even a fraction of the benefits of the motorcycle or scooter. The Segway is ultra slow, totally thieve-worthy at five grand a pop, unable to deal with weather, too slow in traffic and not meant for it anyway, single-user, baggage crippled, short-range, annoying to pedestrians... frankly, aside from the gimmick (it balances... hoo hoo) I simply don't see the appeal.

What we *need* is an electric car that is affordable, quick, baggage-capable, carries passengers, has decent range (300...400 miles or so) and can recharge in a few minutes. Ultracapacitors are at about 1/10th the energy levels required for this right now, and my guess is that within ten years, they'll be right in the "zone." Barring something *actually* revolutionary (like antigravity!), pavement and car-class transportation isn't going anywhere.

Fact: Revolutions are made by people. Not by marketing declarations.

Shouldn't have to turn it on first

[neonfrog]

A device, whose sole trick is balance achieved electromechanically, should be smart enough to sense when a foot and a hand are on it and thus throw itself into balance mode. Sure, you'd need a key to actually go anywhere, but no on-board logic to help prevent you from falling on your face without following a prescribed power on sequence? Not even optionally? Bad design!

My car has NEVER caused me to hurtle dangerously out of the driver's seat because I failed to turn a key.

Re:Cities redesigned

[fyngyrz]

How about pedestrian-friendly urban planning? Eco-friendly transportation is a good step and all, but sensible urban planning is even better.

I have a very simple answer: $5000 isn't "pedestrian friendly."

Aside from that, urban areas in and of themselves aren't really the problem. Suburb to urban commuting, and back again, is the main one. I lived in NYC for years. I didn't own a car; the family didn't own a car. We didn't need one. We had subways and busses. We went everywhere, we saw everything. The beach, the museums, great eateries and fantastic pizza parlors a plenty, the zoo, the village... never needed a car. Mass transportation all the way. Subwau, elevated, busses, the ferries... rarely (like, maybe once year) we'd have a use for a taxi. Urban living doesn't typically require individual transport and hence isn't really the problem. Living in the suburbs and using individual transport is a much more significant problem and things like the Segway won't help even a bit with that. Better mass transport could, if safety, comfort, and capacity issues are addressed, at least, theoretically speaking. but Americans, at least, are in love with their cars, and I think that the bottom line is we had better give them cars that don't work quite as diligently at making a mess out of the atmosphere, and at consuming what appears to be a limited and geopolitically volatile resource (oil.) It's a smaller change for industry to make 9a lot) better cars than it is for Americans to make a social change that abandons the personal long and intermediate range transport. The Segway isn't even addressing the right problem to make a difference; it's a non-factor, on price, performance, and the sex appeal the American public demands.