Smooth, SegwayHow the much-ridiculed personal transportation device finally found a niche.
Posted Wednesday, July 8, 2009, at 11:17 AM ET
Whatever happened to the revolution in personal transportation promised by the Segway?
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponIn the eight years since the upright, self-balancing "personal transporter" first debuted, this question has become a perennial during speculative-future parlor games, on par with queries like "When will soccer finally supplant football in the hearts of Americans?"
The latest flicker of promise for the Segway came when fuel prices spiked to $4 a gallon in June 2008. The company, according to the Wall Street Journal, was reporting its highest-ever sales, while individual dealerships were notching 25 percent improvements in year-over-year sales—numbers that would make Detroit envious. Unfortunately, given that Segway Inc. has to date sold only a fraction of what even a struggling GM sells in a month (according the Journal, it had sold just 23,500—total—by September 2006), the sales boost is less impressive than it seems. And gas prices, of course, have since declined again.
That estimated sales figure seems especially paltry considering inventor and CEO Dean Kamen's 2001 claim that "the impact of this in the twenty-first century will be just like what Henry Ford did at the beginning of the twentieth century." The Segway, he proclaimed, would "change lives, cities, and ways of thinking."
Despite these grandiose claims, or in fact because of them, the Segway is still hampered with something of an image problem. The Onion mercilessly skewered the Segway's breathless hype in a "Do You Remember Life Before the Segway?" segment. ("It's almost as if stuff did happen but wasn't important," one panelist opines.) Commentator Thomas Frank told the New York Times that the Segway has a "redolence of New Economy foolishness. It's as though being a responsible adult is a burden of the working class," while moneyed knowledge-workers "get to posture as special, exalted beings of wonder and innocence." More recently, the Segway was forced to bear the full brunt of whatever humor was present in the transcendently bad (and not-paradoxically box-office-topping) film Paul Blart: Mall Cop, with the very sight of Kevin James astride (or falling off, or crashing) his conveyance played for laughs. (And while we're on the subject of people falling off Segways, let's not forget W.'s highly publicized header.)
The company's own marketing materials seem designed to welcome a certain reflexive snark. "The second you step on," reads one brochure, "five micro-machined gyroscopes and two accelerometers sense the changing terrain and your body position at 100 times per second—faster than your brain can think." That's right, the dusty old human brain, evolved over millions of years to handle without conscious thought things like proprioception and equilibrioception, even over the most uneven of city sidewalks—suddenly obsolete. Segway users refer to the experience as "gliding," as if their two rubber wheels did nothing so sordid as to touch actual pavement
The Least Fun Thing About Video Games: Friendly Fire
Why Is It Such a Big Deal That We Found Water on the Moon?
A Place So Beautifully Sad, It Makes Me Want To Paint
Help! I Got My Co-Worker's Sister Pregnant!
So Will Harry Reid's Health Reform Bill Ruin Medicare or Not?
The Obama Administration Is Giving This Gitmo Detainee a Raw Deal
What else is there to say? Your article is the perfect epitaph for this absurd device. Kamen has done some brilliant things, and I hope he will go on to do more of them in the future, but you have to wonder how he was able to look at the world and say, "What people really need is an expensive new technology that allows them to cover moderate distances at low speeds!" Oh--and provided they don't need to carry anything in their arms, climb stairs, or enter any kind of a confined space, such as a store, office, or another vehicle.
For the price of a Segway, you can buy an excellent, near top-of-the-line scooter, better in almost every practical respect. You can get a low-end moped for a fraction of the price, and I'll sell you my old bike for a hundred bucks. Of course, none of those scream, "I have money! Get out of my way!" quite like a Segway pulling 12 MPH down the sidewalk.
They do look like fun to ride in the right circumstances, though--one of these days, I'm going to get around to doing one of those city tours on one. But a model T for the 21st century? More like an Edsel.
-- ckbryant
(To reply, click here)
I've always felt this way about them. I find them to be more of a nuisance than anything else. I worked at a library a while back where someone was quite irate that the security gates shorted out his Segway as he attempted to ride through them. To add insult to injury, he also managed to lodge himself in the gate halfway through so that we had to dismantle the gates partly before he could leave. I saw the mess and had to retreat to my office to snicker uncontrollably for about 20 minutes. He apparently bitched up a storm about our library not being handicap accessible (he was not in any way disabled himself, but ahem, concerned for others) until the director pointed out that not only do we provide wheelchairs in our library, but the Friends had purchased a deluxe electric scooter that could be moved through the gates without hassle. It is a pretty full service library. There is still a sign warning visitors that Segways will not fit through the gates and may cease functioning, and as far as I know we only ever had one pretentious person who brought one in
On the other hand, I went to D.C. recently, and after the 4 hour marathon gauntlet of monuments and buildings with over 8 miles of walking in 85 degree weather, the Segs in the City tour sure looked good.
-- mmroberto
(To reply, click here)