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.'"

The Segway

[kmhebert]

When "IT" was first announced, I thought Kamen had come up with a new form of fuel that would replace petroleum and really "change the world". So the scooter was kind of a let-down in comparison. Even so, I would love to have one and I imagine most people would. I just wouldn't want to pay for it!

The segway has a perfect market

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

but it's not the one its designer intended. Indeed, on a segway, you look like a total dork and you're dangerous (I was passed by one on the sidewalk, I can attest to this).

But there's one area where segways excel, and that's giving a lot of freedom for disabled people to move around. Each time I hear about a segway story, it's about some handicapped person who finds it marvellous. Like this story [theglobeandmail.com] for example, or this one [nbc4.tv] which are rather typical.

So in short: I reckon segways should be banned on public thoroughfares, and allowed anywhere for disabled people.

Re:Cities redesigned

[Moby Cock]

Paris has a Da Vinci Code Segway tour. It sounded like a great idea but it was absurdly expensive, so I never did it. Hardly a redesigned city, but pretty cool idea nonetheless.

Segways are great

[Phoenix666]

My GF and I rented Segways on a recent trip to Montreal. It was a blast. We zipped all over the waterfront, testing it on inclines, gravel, etc. It's pretty amazing how steep a surface it can climb. I wished it could go faster, actually.

These things could revolutionize cities, but it's not an overnight proposition because you're battling for real estate on the road with cars. Cities like Montreal, with extensive and sensible bike lanes/routes, make the most sense initially. But if they sold them in NYC, you'd really have to sell models equipped with miniguns to defend yourself against crazy taxi drivers.

In any case, if you get the chance to take one for a spin, do. It's really fun.

Segway Knock-offs?

[randomErr]

I've been waiting for a Segway knockoff to appear so I could actually afford a similar device.

Re:Cities redesigned

[the_wesman]

Honestly ... I remember that quote about how cities would be re-designed around the thing - was anyone anywhere actually expecting something like that to happen in 5 years? it may be that cities will be re-designed better to accomodate these wheelie dealies, but certainly not for a long time - first, you've got to have enough of these things on the street to justify it, then the money, not to mention the time

first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women

Re:Cities redesigned

[rblancarte]

While I agree with you that the 5 year window is a short amount of time to really see changes takes place due to Segway, I think it is enough time that we would have:

a. seen major proliferation of the device
b. seen plans made by cites to accomodate them (if they are not yet implimented)

I will have to say that we certainly have NOT seen (a). I won't say (b) hasn't happened either, because my city hasn't done it, but others might have.

Overall, I think that the comment was a very silly one.

Segways will flourish when patents expire

[erroneus]

... the cost of these things is impractically high right now. Once competition is allowed to play, we'll see hundreds of knock-offs from other companies at rates that make them practical. By that time, they'll be even better with fuel cells and better batteries.

It's not THAT complicated, after all...

[Yvan256]

Someone made a "segway" with the old Lego MindStorms kit :
http://www.teamhassenplug.org/robots/legway/ [teamhassenplug.org]

I can see the Segway being expensive for being an electric scooter, but 5000$USD is way too expensive.

Unfortunately

[Shivetya]

the problem I have with these machines is that some government agencies were providing to people who had fitness handicaps (lardasses) as a health benefit covered because of the ADA.

Was really funny watching Atlanta issue a few of the machines to fat cops, cops who could not walk a beat if they had too. Seemed a few other government agencies began looking at these because of "union" rules interest.

I would not mind the machines for people with genuine handicaps, but I certainly don't want to be forced to buy them with my tax money. There are other alternatives that worked for many years before without the need to spend an exhorbinant amount of money.

The problem with genorisity of this sort is that its all so very easy to sell because its not your money and its a guilt trip if you oppose.

A great invention, but too costly and limited in its current form.

Re:Cities redesigned

[walt-sjc]

Keep in mind that most cities still miserably fail at handling wheelchair traffic despite many many more years working on it. Hell, I STILL see brand-new sidewalks that don't have ramps. The stupidity of that is astounding. Keep in mind that the ratio of wheelchair users to Segway users is something like 500,000 to 1.

Re:Cities redesigned

[UbuntuDupe]

Bingo. My mom, for 20 years a traffic engineer, also likes to point out how under the ADA, intersections have to have ramps for wheelchairs. But they don't have to have sidewalks actually, you know, leading to those ramps. (!) So everywhere you see these little slopes at the corners of an intersection, which lead to ... grass. Brilliant, folks. Just brilliant.

That also, of course, makes it more difficult to get where you want to go by walking, but I think that's kind of by design. One of the "perks" of a car-driven (ha, ha) lifestyle is so you can keep the drivel out, and your kids in. (note -- not a position I support, just mocking it here)

One perfect market is tourism

[RoverDaddy]

Like some other respondents below, I recently had a chance to try out a Segway on a 90 minute tour at a mountain resort. It was an amazing experience. I was quite surprised how much power those things have - essential for climbing up those trails and twisting resort roads.

And yes, you sure as hell can fall off, especially if you take a turn at speed. The thing turns by counter-rotating the two wheels, so its turning radius is nearly zero. Due to considerable inertia, the turning radius of my body is quite a bit greater than zero when moving forward at 12 mph. Note however, I never fell off, although it was close a couple times.

Is the segway revolutionary? At $5000 a pop, not a chance. Too bad they couldn't get the price down to the $1000 range. Is the segway useful? The people complaining that it just replaces WALKING should note that 3x the speed makes quite a difference, as well as the fact that not all of us could walk 26 miles a day without serious physical discomfort.

Whether it's useful or not, I suspect we'll be seeing more and more operating within the tourism industry.

Re:Cities redesigned

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the comment: "In Soviet Russia, cities redesign you" is pretty inciteful. It's what they really tried to do and part of why it so sucked to be living there.

Re:The Segway

[Brickwall]

You can get a perfectally acceptable bicycle at Canadian Tire for about $150 Cdn. I'm sure Wal-Mart has them for less. And these are bikes with 27 speeds, decent suspensions, and so on. Sure, you can pay $500 or $2000 for a bike if you want, but then you have to load it up with 20 lbs of locks if you want to keep riding it. I have a beater that I bought new for less than $150 three years ago, and I ride it around in Canada, even in the winter. No one ever looks twice at it, but I've still got it!

Re:It's a heavy POS!

[danlyke]

Agreed. Not only are the the electric scooters that follow the standard scooter design foldable, lighter, and much cheaper, when the batteries run down they're still usable as a conventional scooter.

When the batteries on the Segway [segway.com] run down you've got a 70 lb brick.

I just read Code Name Ginger, which doesn't really ever throw the hard punches, but as I read the book I wondered two things:

1. What was the honest reaction of all the guys hired in total secrecy when the discovered what the project was? During the interview process, nobody will tell you what it is. So you move yourself and your family out to New Hampshire, where you're pretty much committed to the job 'cause Kamen's company is the only high tech employer around, and you discover you're working on a scooter. The pay is okay, but, really, was the culture such that you could then say "what are you guys thinking and how do we turn this into a real product?", or are you then stuck building out someone else's vision?

2. How could they miss that the people they showed it to who thought it was cool were all people with obscene amounts of disposable income? Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr get together to look at the project [stevekemper.net], and even in a crowd with those kinds of financial resources one out of three calls "bullshit". Kinda. Surely even with Kamen's pathological secrecy complex there was someone else outside the company they could have found for some honest reaction.

I'm also shocked and amazed at the "it's better to build a manufacturing process from scratch than show anyone else our product" mindset. If you think that you've got one great idea, you're deluding yourself. If, on the other hand, you think you can continually out-innovate and don't need to constantly remind yourself of the novelty of your one great idea by keeping it secret, then you've got a chance in the marketplace.

Unfortunately, there's so much money in the front end of this process that there's no way they can let anyone else take the patented bits and run with it, the royalties the investors will expect are going to be far too high for anyone else to take a derivative product to market, so while there are some interesting things that I can foresee coming out of balancing on two wheels, it's only going to be sometime after the patents run out that we actually see interesting products.