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The Original Segway Is Officially Being Retired On July 15:
When first revealed to the world back in December of 2001 Dean Kamen’s Segway promised to revolutionize urban mobility. But sticker shock, and cities quickly banning the self-balancing standing scooter, meant the Segway never came to close to realizing that dream. Nineteen years later, on July 15, the original Segway will officially roll off into the sunset.
[...] Dean Kamen, its creator, eventually sold Segway to a Beijing-based robotics startup called Ninebot back in 2015, who has continued to create and sell self-balancing ride-ons under the Segway brand, as well as scooters and other electric-powered car alternatives for getting around a crowded city where streets are often jammed with traffic.
[...] Ninebot has decided to retire the Segway PT, as well as the Segway SE-3 Patroller (a larger three-wheeled version often used by security in airports), and the Segway Robotics Mobility Platform (RMP).
The decision also results in 21 people being laid off from the company’s Bedford, New Hampshire plant, and it marks the end of one of the more ambitious and promising approaches to finally replacing gas-guzzling cars crowding big cities.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:45PM (2 children)
I grew up not far from Dean Kamen's stomping grounds, and was visiting the family for the holidays but had to stop in the local mall for some last-minute shopping. And I hear a "whoosh", and turn my head in time to see Kamen zooming through the mall on his prototype.
I still think they're silly devices: Just about everything you can do with a Segway, you can do with a simpler, cheaper, and more reliable skateboard, scooter, or bicycle. The only people who can't use those kinds of things are those without working legs, and those without working legs have a hard time standing up on a Segway. So while it was an interesting application of his gyroscopic balancing system he'd previously used on a stair-climbing wheelchair, it never had the potential Kamen thought it had.
Kamen has a large streak of both the good and bad sides of Tony Stark.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:15PM
The biggest reason for low adoption was the price.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 25 2020, @09:07PM
I still think they're silly devices: Just about everything you can do with a Segway, you can do with a simpler, cheaper, and more reliable skateboard, scooter, or bicycle.
This is exactly right. The Segway was very impressive technically, but really a stupid idea because it's basically the Rube Goldberg of personal mobility. Just look at all the cheap, rentable scooters in cities now; these things (even the overbuilt rentable ones) cost a small fraction of the cost of a Segway, take up less space on the sidewalk, and are at least as fast. Any idiot who can balance can ride one. There's also rentable bikes (bike share); again, very cheap for the equipment, and reasonably fast though it takes pedal power. Segways just don't make any sense; it's like making an automobile that has feet and legs instead of wheels.