The Trouble with the Segway (2009)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730755 (2009)
The real reason the Segway didn't take off, in my opinion, is that it didn't solve any real problem.
Walking isn't hard for most people; in fact, for most people, walking is among the most pleasant human activities. It's not particularly fast, but when you're walking somewhere, you aren't that concerned about speed. By being slow, it lets you do other things easily -- talk, listen to music, take in the sights and sounds. No one needed "faster automated walking".
What's more, using a Segway to "walk fast" somewhere removes all of the benefits of walking, except the "getting from point A to point B" part. So it's actually worse than the thing it purports to improve. It removes the health benefit; the idle mindlessness of the task (mindless Segway riding is too dangerous); it's more expensive; and, you have to worry about charging, parking, and helmets.
The reason e-bikes are now taking off, by contrast, is that they make perfect sense and solve a real problem. Many people enjoy biking, but some people don't enjoy the strenuous parts of mechanical/manual biking: for example, biking up hills. Further, when you're biking, you usually do care about covering some amount of distance in some amount of time, thus an e-bike helps with that. Many modern e-bike models (like the Bosch, Blix, etc.) combine all the benefits of a normal bike with the additional benefit that a battery provides (making it easier to cover longer distances with limited stamina/endurance/practice). The e-bike is what the Segway should have been -- it solves a real problem.
Spending a substantial amount of money and going to the effort of storing a large object just to be able to get someplace faster (but still not as fast as driving), just isn't worth it to most people.
Price.
For renting scooters, there comes in addition that the renting price is often subsidized by VC money.
And that was expensive enough that some people interpreted segway ownership as 'conspicuous consumption', which some people don't like.
+ Have a reasonable price point. Hundreds, versus thousands.
+ Operates in the wet. Including the very wet, like hail. You can even test it offroad without necessarily needing to use the offroad equipment.
+ Familiarity. You don't need to learn to ride them, because it was likely you'd already ridden something similar.
+ It's easy to safely fall, when you inevitably make a mistake. You may not even hit the ground.
+ You can go a reasonable speed - you're not looking to replace walking, but jogging.
+ More familiarity. The imagery of riding a scooter is more of playing around and having fun, than dorkyness or awkwardness, because the device looks unfamiliar and like a new experience. Which makes you more likely to try it, at least once. More people trying it "just once" the more no one notices if you pick it up, because it becomes common.
Really? I cannot ride a two-wheeled scooter (electric or otherwise) for the life of me. I make it about 4 feet before falling over. I think my record distance is 10 feet.
Escooters move at similar speeds to bikes so fit in the same niche. They are also narrower, and this matters on roads.
Exactly. An anecdote: babies have a "transportation mode" which in an evolutionary behaviour. I used to carry my two daughters and walk around the house for 1 hour with low light (no Lego's on the floor, no darkness, no stairs), there is human contact, it's good exercise for parents, even relaxation and meditation, and babies get calm and sleep well.
IME, when you come out of the gate not even remotely hitting the expectations that you yourself set on a product launch it takes a very very long time to recover from that setback. If you at least solve real problems at some kind of palatable price point you can make up some of that loss, but when you have and expensive solution looking for a problem, not so much.
The Segway had many issues, IMO one of the larger ones was that it was not that suitable for use in inclement weather. You would think a company based in NH would get this. They were also cumbersome to move around, and didn't even have a kickstand initially, so the matter of where/how you park the thing when not is use just added to the awkwardness of the whole thing.
And then the announcement came, and it turned out to be a glorified electric scooter with a silly name and a $5,000 price tag.
Strangely, none of the big names involved seemed to suffer any reputational blowback for what now seems like outright lying in service of someone else's hype campaign.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2801380/dean-kamen-s-b...
[2] https://www.economist.com/taxonomy/term/34/14587780?page=293
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/04/engineering.hi...
[4] https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2001/01/27/ginger-in...
"Do You Remember Life Before The Segway"
https://www.theonion.com/in-the-know-do-you-remember-life-be...
If that actually happened, then maybe the Segway would have taken off. San Francisco's core downtown area from North Beach to Mission Bay is only around 1.5 miles, with a Segway you could get from one end to the other in 5 minutes - faster than just the wait for a train or bus. Or from Ocean Beach to Union Square in 30 minutes, again faster than the train.
Of course, commute hour would have been a mess with a hundred thousand segways trying to commute to downtown.
This is the reason I would pick for why Segway didn’t take off. I think it would have been popular if it had entered public consciousness in a more gradual way. Instead, the public was pumped up with enough hype that nothing was going to live up to expectations. Oh, and South Park’s take took a bit of prestige away too (hilariously so).
This can't be the answer, since it doesn't explain the huge explosion in non-bike forms of electric transportations.
From scooters to electric skateboards to hoverboards to a number of single-wheeled designs. These things are absolutely ubiquitous in any major city, US or Europe, right now.
These all fit in the same practical niche as a Segway, yet are cheaper and cooler-looking.
All of these pay as you go scooter services solved the cost problem and are everywhere now, in exactly the same niche that Dean Kamen envisioned, minus cities redesigning themselves around scooters of course.
These also use the existing car infrastructure (as they're usually 6-10 passengers drinking + the driver (who stays sober for obvious reasons) and thus about the same size as a transit van), no specialised bike infrastructure is required.
- Massive and sustained increase in cycle routes (also applicable to ebikes, scooters, etc.), especially fully segregated from traffic and pedestrians, and including redesigning some major junctions and transport hubs
- Actual changes in law to allow e-scooters (initially via hire schemes) as well as police generally turning a blind eye to technically illegal personal e-scooters/and electric skateboards
- Conversion of parking spaces to cycle racks, resident's cycle storage huts, and ebike/scooter drop-off points
- City run cycle hire services and docking infrastructure as well as widespread app based services
- Closing many residential streets to through traffic, allowing only local traffic (almost none) and pedestrians, cycles, scooters, skateboards (seriously, this is amazing, streets are super quiet and I can get around my local area by bike or electric scooter/skateboard quickly and incredibly safely)
- Requiring cycle parking and storage in new residential and office developments
- Increasing of congestions/pollution charging
And when I travel around Europe, though I don't know as many of the specifics, it feels likely many cities are at least as advanced as London, quite likely moreso in many cases. The US… not so much.
One thing I had completely forgotten is how mediocre the specs were on the first generation Segways. Top speed of 17mph, but realistically more like 12. Range: up to 17 miles. Charge time: 10 hours. MSRP: $4,500.
This is also one of those rare consumer products with dubious distinction of killing its own creator.
Exactly. When I first saw them I thought that they look like fun. When I saw the prices, I decided that the fun can wait.
Ubiquitous is doing a lot of work there. In the Northeast US, I've probably seen an increase in bikes given some dedicated bike lanes but I rarely see anything else.
These have all declined a lot from our view in Southern California, seeing a lot fewer of them after the peak in... 2018 was it?
Electric bikes are still increasing slowly but surely every year as the price comes down.
It did solve a real problem, it just did so badly - it was heavy, expensive, clunky, and had no suspension so could not handle much surface imperfection.
I think Kamen's big mistake was that he was pathologically afraid of anything smacking of speed, competition, or plain fun. He explicitly worked to avoid any association or possible diversion of use of the Segway in anything like that, because he thought a key audience was city planners who hated skateboards, and thus any fun at all would result in them being banned from city use. Maybe he's right, but if so, the solution space was zero.
Yet, that total avoidance of fun resulted in a number of disasterous results. First, as PG pointed out, the users all looked like dorks - because they were riding a device designed only for dorks.
This also resulted in zero engineering being dedicated to performance, and the, IMO, insane decision to have no suspension. This resulted in the spectacle of President Bush falling off one on his very public ride, simply from riding over a very small hole. Another very public black eye.
and the general absolutely clunky engineering of the thing resulted in no fun, no enthusiasm, and the only real use case being the mall cop market. And a few isolated groups playing Segway Polo is not exactly an activity to generate enthusiasm.
I'm quite convinced that if he'd engineered the thing to be fun, or at least hackable to be fun, it would have taken off. It would have been much more streamlined, cool looking higher performance, and with a suspension to be able to handle at least a bit of terrain (heck even 2" of travel would have made a huge difference). It would not have been that hard to add a "Calm Zone Mode" akin to phone's Airplane Mode for use in the city...
But, that's all history now
I think this utilitarian feature of the bike is the biggest reason the bike is taking off.
Yes. And waiting in a line can be much more tiring than just walking.
And the guy standing in line playing a game of blitz chess won’t feel exhausted by boredom, but may have less mental bandwidth to send a tenuous email when he gets home from the DMV. Cheers
Agreed with everything except the helmets part. The original Segways maxed out at 10 mph (slower than some folks run!), while it looks like the current model is 12½ mph. There is no particular need for a helmet at that low a speed — it’s almost purely superstition.
I kinda feel like I personally would prefer a Segway to an e-bike, but I haven’t ridden either. Kind of feels like a Segway would encourage one to keep one’s eyes up and pay attention to one’s surroundings more.
Where I live electric scooters aren't allowed to go faster than that anyway and head-injuries has skyrocketed.
Add to that that a Segway is even worse than a scooter for safety since they are much higher.
Perhaps beyond that in that the Segway ran into the same systemic and structural problems that people that use traditional active transportation devices like bicycles and scooters ran into: the cities don't have safe infrastructure.
The big problem is that while building safe infrastructure for Segways, scooters and bicycles is pretty cheap and well worthwhile, because it would effectively require taking road space away from exclusive car use, there's an enormous well funded political lobby that will turn out to quash any efforts. Doesn't help that for some bizarre reason transportation choice has also been politicized so it's even a partisan reflex to oppose such things too.
That's it. I don't think I've seen any other Segways in use in real life.
But walking is hard for some people, and I don't get why Segways didn't take off as mobility aids. Especially since the Segway technology came from a power wheelchair that was able to stand and climb stairs (!) Yet even there, I don't know any paras or quads who use them, or anything like them.
Hoverboards require balance, e-bikes are hard to mount, neither can be used (politely) indoors. My wheelchair has e-bike-like wheels, which helps amazingly, but I can still walk a bit, so I'd like some kind of compromise. Where's the innovation? It's 2022 and I want my powered exoskeleton, damnit!
They solve the same problem as an escooter does, which you see everywhere in large cities now.
Contrast with today, electric scooters are cheap and ubiquitous. They can be purchased for less than $300 and deliver on the same promise.
So, yes, he's right about that feeling, but he's wrong that it's what held them back. That could have been overcome. Even the price could have been overcome, if the experience were compelling. But it wasn't. They were too big and too heavy -- too impractical, in other words.
[0] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/71902-ginger-unveiledits...
And once it was "just a scooter", and it wouldn't really work all that well on city streets, on city sidewalks, you actually could fall off it, it would suck in winter, suck in snow, suck in rain, you couldn't carry it, and all the rest, it lost a ton of hype almost instantly. The self balancing trick didn't overcome the sheer obvious impracticality of it.
All I could think was "whrrr whrr pew pew whrrrr whrrrrr"... like this photo: https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/segway_1.jpg
It was impossible to take them seriously. Honestly, lol, I feel for them. Some higher up probably thought that was cheaper than horses and fancier than bikes, so... poor officers.
One problem I encountered is that a Segway takes up all the space on a sidewalk with parking meters on it, pedestrians would have to step aside.
They failed for the average consumer, but they served a purpose for other sectors.
Fortunately, the economic downturn seem to have killed them off for group tours.
I can't think of any reason i'd want one, they don't solve any problem I have.
I remember we featured this as one of the futuristic new tech pieces at Disneyland's Innoventions, which I used to work at from 2000 to 2002. Virtually nothing we featured there ever really took off. Aside from the segway, we had Sony's AIBO the robotic dog, which was cute and fun to work with, but real dogs are too awesome for any meaningful portion of the market to want to replace them with a robot. We had an Internet-connected toaster that printed a weather report on your toast. Someone clearly had the sense that paper news was on its way out but people largely don't want to be chained to their desk while eating breakfast, but did not anticipate that general-purpose computing devices would become so small and mobile as quickly as they did, and something as niche as only serving the weather would never have a place. We had very early flat-screen TVs back when plasma was the only option and they cost around ten grand for an entry model. Those sort of eventually caught on when they were replaced with better and cheaper technologies that consumers could actually afford.
I remember reps coming out and training us to use this for our showcases. It was novel and all, and the basic tech in terms of using weight-shift detection and gyroscopes seems like it should have good uses elsewhere, but I couldn't help but get the sense that, like the current top comment says, my body can already do this, and doesn't require extra storage space, charging, a place to dock, doesn't take up the space in a crowd of a 900 pounder. It's great technology, but the application makes no sense.
Lots of people who never biked used those scooters instead, because 1) they were heavily subsidized by careless VC money and 2) less sweat than biking. Bike commuting always seemed to me like a niche white thing, like urban hiking on wheels, but those scooters, man... EVERYWHERE.
Hopefully someone can find some more recent data on it, but as of 2009 [1] the demographics of cyclists in the US mostly matched up with the demographics of the overall population, with a couple of exceptions:
white:
- % of bike trips: 79%
- share of population: 75%
- % of bike trips: 10%
- share of population: 12%
- % of bike trips: 8%
- share of population: 15%
- % of bike trips: 3%
- share of population: 4%
For income level, the poorest quartile was overrepresented (31%), but the other three quartiles were pretty close (21%, 23%, 25%).
So with cycling being far less common in the US compared to other countries with safer infrastructure (0.6% of people bike to work in the US [2] compared to 27% in the Netherlands [3]), you're not going to see many cyclists, and since white people make up a large percentage of the population, if you see a cyclist, there's a fair chance that they'll be white. But as the country becomes more diverse (and hopefully more people begin cycling to work), hopefully that perception will fade, and hopefully the trend toward racial parity for cycling continues.
1. https://grist.org/biking/2011-04-06-race-class-and-the-demog...
2. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/05/younger-worke...
3. https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documenten/rep...
(edit: formatting)
Interesting stats in this article anyhow, especially about how effective bike lanes are at encouraging ridership among underrepresented demographics:
https://www.intelligenttransport.com/transport-news/122846/l...
Downside: you might not have immediate availability, but you can always walk a block or two to find another scooter.
The first part might have been overcome by launching it in Japan where sidewalks are much wider and multi-use (pedestrians and bicycles) is the norm and expected "rules of the sidewalk" are already in place. The cost though would still have been hard to swallow.
Put another way, it was all about its features and not nearly enough about benefits (to me).
To often it was asked, "Why should I care?" or "What's in it for me?" and the answer(s) created more doubt than it resolved.
Then I saw the price. And that was the end of that.
$7,000 to $10,000 for one - you can buy a car, and pay for years worth of gas for that much.
Imagine how much less traffic and emissions there would be if Segway had put a reasonable price on their product.
The problem with Segways I think are analogous to when I travel on the sidewalk with my bike. You're too big for most sidewalks and moving fast, so people have to hurriedly shuffle to get out of your way. It's annoying and they respond crudely. Segway I think also attracts further attention because it's a known-expensive device. It doesn't occur to most people that I paid $2k for my bike but that doesn't stop cars from being passive aggressive for, again - taking real estate from them.
This turned out to be prescient: I commuted to work today on a vehicle made by Segway (a Ninebot scooter). I'd argue that more of the appeal is that it lets you go as fast as bikes (without breaking a sweat), rather than the dorkiness, but I think the two are related. Admittedly I felt a bit dorky the first time I rode it, but now I'm convinced that it's the ultimate vehicle to have in a city.
My two cents about the main reason the Segway didn't take off is that many people attacked it out of fear that it would take over sidewalks and put pedestrians in danger. It doesn't fit comfortably in a shared sidewalk, or bike lane, or road with all the other transportation options available. And the high cost made it impossible for it to become the dominant alternative transportation form. However, it works well in warehouses and for policing/security.
Kamen’s self-balancing wheelchairs are neat, but the Segway is a non-solution.
It seems more likely that the reason is because the Segway replaces walking, while the motorcycle is generally used to get somewhere that you couldn't walk to.
IMHO segways kind of fell off around the same time that he went flying off of a cliff test-driving some offroad model [1]
And of course you can't ride it on the street. It has nowhere to go but warehouses and hangars.
See also: Google X
Some prior discussion from a submission I made on the segway a few months ago
Someone riding a Standup-paddle looks like a mega-dork, yet it is a massive success (at least in Europe).
(1) I don't think this is the reason it did not work. There are lots of things that make you look like a dork -- PCs, airpods etc -- but they took off like rocketships (speaking as someone who adopted these dork items whole heartedly).
(2) I agree it is a mystery why Segways didn't work, but I think it remains an unsolved mystery.
(3) We have more information now that we have lime and other similar items available. (*)
(*) This is actually a point in PG's favor because the lime's are skateboard inspired. But they're not undorky.
We have a 1:1 skateboard Segway: the Onewheel. It healthily solves the dorky problem, and then some. Still, this doesn't seem to be a perfect solution because, in the face of one of the most consumer-hostile manufacturers around, people are turning to dorkier alternatives (such as EUCs).
Although few things look as dorky as a Segway, especially when tourists are driving them around single-file.
It still blows my mind that actual adults wear AirPods in public. Sometimes actual professional adults who want to be taken seriously (e.g. in business meetings). There is just no way for someone to wear AirPods and look fashionable.