History of Dean Kamen's Segway
slate.com
slate.com
The story they told me is that Segway was going to be successful in the USA as a mobility scooter for the elderly, giving range and speed to people who could not walk or cycle far and fast, while not still requiring a traditional wheelchair.
From memory, the strategy was to get the Segway classified as a mobility/accessibility device, which would gain regulatory exemptions and access to funding from public health. They were lobbying the EU with their left hand, and running Segway demonstrations at TV-friendly events like Campus Party with their right hand.
I don't know how much these people believed that this would work in the EU. I didn't believe it. But they weren't getting paid for believing it, nor for persuading me. They were getting paid for telling everyone about it.
I do not think it ever can be classified as a mobility device for elderly.
The wheelchair hit the public as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT. I knew it as "FRED". I have never observed anyone using its equal in terms of mobility capabilities.
As an example of what sort of other stuff HERL did back in the day: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00039...
My skepticism was rather about Segway, the product, being useful as a mobility device, and recognised as such by European regulators.
What it aimed to do, regular electric scooters done a decade later by the virtue of being cheap enough.
Interesting a third argument against it was that "nobody" would need/want an electric mode of transportation like that vs. walking or using a bike. Price was of course a factor, but it was not the main argument brought up as far as I remember.
Maybe because this product was mostly discussed in depth by rich people. Poor people just seen it as dumb gadget for the rich that will never stop being dumb because it costs as much as a car.
If it was priced like "hoverboards" it might have application beyond mallcops and tours.
After orientation and a bit of balance training the group I was in followed the instructor as we spent a good hour or so travelling down muddy tracks and across country fields.
For my part, I enjoyed the experience, and I could certainly see the appeal of using one off-road[2] and would have happily spent my weekends on one in the countryside. On the road/pavement, they had much less appeal as they were bulky and hard to steer nimbly in crowded areas.
As we know they were an important first step to self-balancing vehicles/robots so we shouldn't judge them too harshly; many initial inventions fail, just to be reborn years later as an improved concept.
---
[1] The horse kind, not the keyboard-warrior kind.
[2] These Segways were fitted out with larger off-road tyres compared to the ones you usually see.
It's harded to be that aggressive and dangerous on a bike. I use to be really afraid for my wife when she went out during pregnancy. Assholes on those drove around her recklessly all the time.