Segway's owner dies in accident after riding one of his Segway off a cliff | Hacker News Reader

Segway's owner dies in accident after riding one of his Segway off a cliff

dailymail.co.uk

20 pointsbjonathan23 comments

From the article it seems that this was one remarkable and generous man, which makes the accident even more tragic.

On the technical side of things I wonder what the consequences for the Segway brand will be. It always seemed to me as if the iBot was a Good Idea (tm) which lead to a mere novelty toy for polo games. If this accident leads to accusations concerning the safety of these rides (quite probable imo, being a media cynic) this probably has the potential to hurt quite a bit.

He owns the company. Do you think the media will blame Segway for his death?

Certainly not his family.

Quite unfortunate.

"Segway company owner killed by own Segway" is virtually irresistible as a media narrative.

If he drove his car off a cliff and died, would the headline be "Porche killed Segway owner"?

It might. Rogue SUVs kill people all the time (cf. "SUV hits, kills Md. Green Party Senate candidate," http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h8FiQb29HT...)

No, they don't. People driving them kill people.

If the owner of the Porche company drove his Porche off a cliff then yes, I imagine the same sort of thing would happen.

Perhaps, but it's impossible to measure. The loss of the top man will have a direct impact on the whole company, including Segway.

It is clear that the challenge is to find a way to give free reign to the intellectual curiosity while studiously ignoring the lurid temptation of discussing the faux-irony of his death.

Ok, I'll bite. How about using GPS to make a safety feature where the Segway will not ride within a certain distance of "dangerous" features like sea cliffs? An override such as turning a master key would be required.

Such a feature could also help deter theft: Segways designed to be used on a single property would not operate outside the property, something like the locks on shopping carts.

If you're taking your Adventure-model segway out in the country for sightseeing, you're surely going to override that safety feature at some point.

Good point! I can purchase an SD card from Garmin with additional mapping features such as North America's paddling waterways. Garmin sells data like that (resells is probably the actual mechanism) and develops additional revenue from their customers.

So... Perhaps there's a market for selling GPS data. Some of it is safety-oriented, some of it concerns rideable trails, and so forth???

The Segway's "drive by wire" nature does lend itself to making it a platform of sorts.

There were car accidents where people trusted their GPS/navigation systems too much, so I don't see how trusting your GPS even more would help.

What is the irony? That he died while riding a Segway PT? Have no avid cyclists been killed on bikes? Have no automotive execs been killed in car crashes? Have no test pilots been killed in flight?

Face it, there are many hazards in life, and it stands to reason that owners and high-profile individuals in all kinds of positions stand to be killed or harmed by their technology.

In fact, it is more likely for an avid cyclist to die on a bike, a motorhead to die driving, and a test pilot to die in flight, than normal. This makes sense. It is the opposite of irony, obvious.

That's probably why he said "faux-irony"...

This seems very odd to me. I mean this things don't travel that fast, couldn't he jumped (stepped?) off of it? Sad story :(

You can easily injure yourself on one. You might find some Youtube videos that show it in painful details, I've watched some people go down live. Usually this only happens if you do something risky or dumb (one example is if one of the wheels gets temporary stuck/runs free from my experience). In that case no - you won't just jump off. I'd more describe it as being thrown off..

The original article (as I mentioned in the dupe thread of this news already) has a comment that suggests that a medical emergency (heart attack, for example) might have lead to the whole accident. Sounds reasonable at first.

While never having ridden any of these things. It seems to me they have an obvious design fault while riding on a decline, where gravity pulls you forward which leads to the snowball effect of increasing your speed indefinitely.

Well, I have ridden various Segway models, and it works nothing like that at all. You can easily come to a complete stop on any incline (provided the tires can maintain traction eg: an 89 degree hill might pose some challenges to the general physics of the situation).

The models I've driven have a speed limit (either in "beginner" or "expert" mode, 9kph/~20kph respectively, iirc). If you hit that, the segway is actively working against the inclination of the handle. Basically you can try to push with force and lean with your whole weight against the handle, it just won't move away. On the contrary: Fighting it to hard leads more to you standing upright again or getting a small inclination to the back, _although you try to do the opposite_.

I have a disclaimer of my own though: I've ridden them on ~flat terrain and only fought these safety mechanism there, trying to go faster. I'd expect them to work just the same going downhill though.

There is no coasting or "snowball effect" - the Segway is not a freewheeling device. The wheels only do what the computers tell the motors to do.

May be I wasn't clear earlier, what I meant was not freewheeling but gravity pulling the PERSON forward which makes him/her lean forward and hence the segway style acceleration.

Gravity doesn't pull you forward, it pulls you down. Unless a particular human never learned to walk or sit upright, their natural tendency in balance is to hold themselves in-line with gravity*, not necessarily at a perpendicular angle to the surface they're standing on. (There is some input from the eyes, which trick house attractions and the like exploit, but we're usually pretty good about it.)

This is what learning balance is all about, and most of us pick it up by the time we're two years old. Segways detect the human riders' effort at balancing (which most do without effort or awareness), and exploit it.

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