Every single Onewheel is being recalled after four deaths

A toddler's tiny mass, along with a rubbery and flexible body, allow them this luxury. An adult's mass quickly runs afoul of the above mentioned physics-gut-check.

The gamut of human capability when crashing vehicles is SO MUCH larger than most people realize. The average bike commuter probably has a much higher chance of injury in a solo crash than someone who's skated for decades on a onewheel. When I see discussions of safety I rarely see "get good at crashing" brought up, but it's such an important skill.

When I ride my bike I'm always hopping up curbs at speed, doing quick whip skids/ted shreds etc, not just because it's fun, but because those are the skills you need to stay alive in abnormal situations. It's honestly kind of baffling to me that most people don't actively work on expanding their safety envelope.

You can get good at crashing, and at avoiding crashes, and when you do you can either do the same things safer, or do more fun things with the same level of safety. This is why Alex Honnold isn't dead (yet).

If you are riding with good posture and awareness it you can run out and roll from a one-wheel.

You might not be able fully "run it out" given the speed, but every step you take when bailing is a good thing and rolling out after you take a few steps will help as well.

At the end of the day, it's obviously going to be more dangerous than a bike or a scooter, though. My issues with future motion is more to do with their extremely poor response to design flaws, though.

I think that riding at more reasonable speeds and riding with focus and awareness is still reasonable, but the faults we've seen add hidden risks that are difficult to address as a rider.

I had a good laugh with a co-worker a few weeks back when we saw a chick wearing sunglasses with her hands deep in her hoody pockets riding a similar single-wheeled vehicle at an intersection. Looking cool trumps common sense for certain personality types.

Make sure you dispose of that helmet properly. They are not designed to survive crashes and are considered a consumable in such events.

Here in Barcelona these things are super common. The riders seem to be pretty adept. The problem is more that they don't care about pedestrians, they zoom around while on their phones on the pavement where they're not allowed and zip around pedestrians way too fast.

I don't care if they kill themselves but they're risking other people's safety more.

I have and ride a onewheel but never skateboarded. It really is a different balance; one-wheeling hasn't helped me a bit for skateboarding skills either.

My take on the safety bit is I would never ride the one-wheel at the top speed the device supports, and would never ride without a helmet or on a road with traffic. It can and will dump you. I've had the battery-out dump (when I knowingly experimented after its low power warnings). Basically if you go faster than you can run out/step and roll out from you're inviting yourself trouble.

I know a few people that bought these to commute around town. I always thought they were bat's hit crazy and did try, unsuccessfully, to talk the out of it.

I skateboard when I was younger and generally feel comfortable enough on any board where I can stand sideways. No way in hell I wanted to try these though, the top speed alone masks me way too nervous even with experience skateboarding, surfing, and wake boarding.

I've been an active skateboarder, snowboarder, and surfer for 25 years, and have ridden a One Wheel XR for about three years.

All are different in terms of most of the skills needed to do any of them.

The One Wheel is much more like a snowboarding in soft powder than it is like skateboarding, but even then, it's not quite the same. There's a sort of softish center pivot feeling, where on a snowboard it depends on where your edges are.

Skill wise, you don't need any to make the One Wheel do what's advertised. You do need skill to ride it confidently, but you gain those skills as you use it.

I've had one very bad fall on the One Wheel, and it was bad. It slide out while going fast down a steep slippery/sandy hill, and then nosedived, which sent me cart wheeling, then whipped my heel into the ground, shattering it into 23 pieces. I was in bed for 6 months, and didn't walk without help for 12.

I actually think my other boarding skills made the injury worse. I reacted as if the board was a skateboard, where a sideways slide is something I'm super comfortable with and do on purpose. That reaction was to lean deep, counter to the forces of the slide. The big fat gripping tire of the One Wheel bit in, then acted as a fulcrum with my body as the lever, and I just went sailing.

The advice from the GP to have One Wheel-curious people try a skateboard first is indeed good advice. It won't teach you how to ride a One Wheel, but it will teach you how hard the ground is.

And you'll notice that he successfully plants his left foot, but momentum just carries him ahead and into the fall and roll. And this is a best case scenario.

"The deaths came as a result of head trauma, with at least three of the accidents happening with the rider in a helmet."

He’s probably going about 1/4 of this things top speed too.

I’ve had this same thing happen on a electric skateboard at about this speed but on asphalt. Shoulder dislocated, elbow broke, wrist sprain so severe I had to relearn how to use my hand. And I was a skateboarder my whole life leading up to that so I knew how to take a fall.

I still use electric bike and fat tire scooter/bike. But the high speed even on that feels sketchy. All it takes is a little gravel or something and you’ll lose your front wheel and eat it hard. That actually happened to a friend growing up, we were flying down a steep hill (ok maybe 20mph) on our BMX bikes. He hit gravel and the front wheel slid out. He had to have his upper lip stitched back on.

At a faster speed I’m not even sure you could soften the crash with your arms much at all.

Three of the reported deaths were from head trauma, while wearing a helmet.

I’ve not seen an electric scooter that can go faster than a bicycle so far (at least being sold in Europe).

I assume that riding a Boosted requires more skateboarding skill than riding a Onewheel?

cross-country skiing is not that bad.

Ride in the middle of the run to avoid the trees! Falling on hard pack is an excellent way to jolt yourself awake ;) In any event, carving at high speed keeps your body pretty close to the snow.

Both are far more forgiving than skateboarding, even given the speeds you're sometimes wiping out at.

You just sort of bounce down the slope, and it hardly even scuffs up your snow gear.

Wipe out at a quick on a skateboard - the pavement has no give, and you're not all bundled up because it's summer. You're getting road rash, minimum, maybe some more serious damage to bones, head, etc.

Rollerblades, not quite as bad. They aren't constantly trying to run away from you. Similar failure mode though.

Definitely saw this in Atherton the other day.

This. I own two Pint Xs. Ride almost every day for three years. Had two nose dives at full speed and ran both out. I'll never upgrade to a faster model for this reason. You can't run out a nosedive going any faster. Also, the Pint X is just so nimble and fun. To me it's the sweet spot.

One day I decided to ride a cheap, narrow, narrow-wheeled skateboard down a fairly steep access road that led to a beach parking lot where I grew up.

At some point during the descent, the board started to shimmy violently, forcing me to jump off... but I was already going faster than I could run. But run I did, and my feet and legs literally fell behind my torso... upon which I fell and skidded down the asphalt, shirtless. I did manage to keep my chin up and off the pavement as I slid, however.

It was night-time and we were at the beach with some relatives. I gritted my way through playing in waves and showing my relatives around. Nobody noticed anything. When we got home and I walked into the light, my mom gawked at the shredded skin on my chest and, being a woman of considerable decorum, did NOT shout "WTF!!!" But that was definitely the nature of the response.

I’m sat here with a bunch of metal in my shoulder and a brain full of analgesia after coming off my mountain bike. I crashed at about a tenth of the speed I’d normally be going.

My helmet was trashed and definitely saved my life. I’m wondering whether extra padding would have saved me from weeks of pain, a surgery and months of immobilisation followed by months of rehab.

The thought of blasting down the road on a One wheel in T-shirt and jeans gives me chills now.

I rode an e-unicycle (EUC) for a few years as my main mode of transport. It was super fun, and after my first year I was really quite good at it, good enough to even dodge a few cars on instinct: my response was entirely unplanned, a reflex—a sharp turn, rather than an attempt to slow down, that I was shocked my body performed in retrospect. (Turns rely on center-of-mass and rubber friction, rather than motor acceleration or deceleration, which are limited.)

I loved riding that thing, it felt like flying. It was addictive. I rode it like wings, my instincts were so good it felt like I was one with it—it no longer required any intentional planning. Sure, I had my share of spills, but learned from each one where I'd messed up and how to become exceptionally careful, and was fortunate that I recovered from each in a few days.

I say all this because, like you, I now realize it was the single most life-threatening risk I've ever taken in my life. These things you write are 100% true:

> All it takes is one missed sign, one pothole, one inattentive driver, one loose bushing, one nail on the road, one patch of oil. You get the idea. The number and variety of risks and significance of the damage they could do should be enough to avoid.

> All it takes is one "oh shit" moment where you miss the transfer of center of mass. You face plant and possibly slide directly under the path of the hazard you braked for.

You are extremely exposed, and trusting your life to firmware developers.

99.99% of the time it is the unbelievable feeling of flying, slicing through the wind.

0.01% of the time it is slamming your body into rough pavement at 20mph, like diving face-first off a two-story building, no warning. No way to see it coming.

My EUC now sits in my shed, gathering dust.

Your head and feet are moving at the same speed. Very fast. The board leaves you behind by stopping. You now put one foot on the ground. Because of friction, your foot stops and goes flying behind you before you can put your next foot on the ground or apply any meaningful weight to it. Because your foot was thrown backwards, it applies angular momentum to your body and you begin spinning around your center of mass (aka, falling forward). Less than 100ms has passed at this point. In the best case, your other foot is impacting the ground, right now, directly under you. But it can't take your weight before it has flung behind you and adding to your angular momentum, forcing you to go face first. It is at this point, you are capable of realizing you are going to fall face first. You have ~80ms to realize this, and put your arms up, before impact. Even if you have amazing reflexes, an impulse isn't reaching your muscles in less than 40ms, that means you need to move your arms from 'keeping balance mode' to 'defensive mode' (including applying resistive power to keep them there) in less than another 40ms. It literally isn't happening.

People who fall from standing by their own volition usually have a sense something is wrong and can fall relatively gracefully. People who are tripped from standing collapse like a sack of bricks. Same thing, you don't see falls coming on these things.

The board would completely disengage and the nose would drop. The best I can explain the feeling is that it felt like I’d go from tapping the gas to pushing the clutch all the way down. There would be no ‘pushback’ from the board beforehand. Sometimes it’d happen even when starting from a standstill.

From what I remember, the blue power light would be on, but it would take restarting the board for it to engage properly again.

went down this rabbit hole recently and ended up getting a folding ebike

once you start scaling up 2 wheel scooter wheels to become big enough to comfortably ride anywhere in a city that wasnt explicitly designed for scooter traffic (nyc for example), the weight of the whole scooter starts surpassing even lighter ebikes (60 lb+), without the benefit of lower costs or more transportability (few/none 500W+ scooters can be carried comfortably through a narrower nyc restaurant door)

this one came closest https://inokim.shop/collections/inokim-scooters/products/ino... but after testing it out I couldn't see the upside over a smaller folding ebike

There are plenty of compact options for sure, but I haven’t found any as ‘hassle-free’, at least when I reach my final destination :)

I also have a folding e-bike which has larger and wider wheels than a scooter, which is preferable in my opinion. The problem with scooters and e-bikes, even folding ones, are that a lot of buildings will not let you take them indoors. Or most will have you use a freight elevator, which is operated manually AND has set hours that it’s run.

There’s also the difficulty of storing/locking them if you go out for dinner or some other event. Something as small as a Onewheel that you could pick up and walk with, and is small enough to store under a table, or take on a train without blocking anyone is a dream in this sort of environment.

Edit: I should also note that I’m speaking from my very NYC perspective.

What is a nosedive in this context?

Maneuverability. You can turn in place. The tire is massive compared to a skateboard wheel. It can run off road, it feels nice on road.

I can absolutely assure you that ‘aesthetics’ don’t play any role in any of my commuter options :)

I also stand by this: The Onewheel was the most versatile commuter option I’ve ever used in NYC.

If failsafes were added that didn’t rely on ‘maintain balance while skidding on your nose or tail at 15+mph in traffic if the power decides to randomly cut off’, I’d likely buy it again.

Anyone who rides a OneWheel in public is not someone who's unduly concerned with aesthetics :D

I think e-scooter like xiaomi ones works better for majority of population and is also foldable

tell me more about your setup. do you have risers under the trucks? seems like 60mm wheels on a standard popsicle board would be prone to wheel bite without really tight trucks.

Yeah, the skateboard-to-bike range of mobility tools is just lovely in the city -- they have the property that you can go much faster than walking with far less effort, but you can also carry your transportation (up stairs, over obstacles, etc.) With a car, if you run into a traffic jam or an obstacle or a mechanical failure, you're screwed.

Bikes are definitely on the big end, being things that not everyone can carry, and that definitely can't just be strapped onto your back. (But they do let you carry cargo.)

It has a tilt back feedback. However it is possible to miss it and there is not much buffer after you hit the feedback point.

I believe they just released a new firmware along with this recall and they have added something new. Might be vibration or sound but I can't remember exactly what.

It has a very obvious pushback effect. I haven’t ridden an EUC, but I suspect the difference is you only have part of each foot as leverage to counteract it, so the device can more easily counteract the rider trying to push through it. Turn the rider sideways with each point of contact about a foot out from center, combined with a much smaller tire and lower wattage motor, and it’s easy for the rider to counteract it all the way to the system’s limit.

Then again I’ve seen videos of EUCs doing nearly double the top speed of a Onewheel.

It’s all relative to the rider’s ability and willingness to continue stomping the accelerator as it increases in resistance.

The VESC community is extraordinarily impressive.

At the same time, I’m doubtful that software bugs in the proprietary code are related to the vast majority of these failures people describe. The only legitimate issues I’ve seen are caused by sensors (either the foot sensor itself, or improper mounting usually related to grip tape) or water damage.

A Onewheel attempts to self balance. To accelerate, you lean the direction you want to go. As your speed increases, the board starts tilting the nose up to signal it’s reaching its limit. Powering the motor requires energy, and self-balancing requires additional energy beyond that, so a safe amount of headroom needs to be reserved to accommodate for variations in terrain and rider movements.

When the noise starts tilting up, there’s nothing to stop the rider from leaning forward more, which also signals to accelerate. This is called “pushing through pushback” and it’s required to go more than ~16-18 mph.

Imagine the extreme case where you quickly lift your rear foot off the board. Obviously it’s going to stop suddenly, and you’ll fly through the air and smash into the ground. Every nosedive is exactly this scenario, just slightly less extreme.

Once I grasped this simple concept it became obvious that every fall was my own fault. This is why I recommend new riders practice balancing with the board powered off. If you can’t easily do that, you have no business pushing through pushback.

The boards being “fixed” by this recall are getting a new feature that makes the board vibrate at high speeds. This is done by modulating the motor, it requires no new transducer. The only “failure” is of the rider being oblivious to the signal the board is sending.

Source: own a V1, Plus, and GT; ridden thousands of miles on my own and other’s boards; ran a meetup and met a huge variety of rider types; once raced in the GoPro Games; crashed hundreds of times including the obligatory bone-breaking incident resulting in surgery

tl;dr: Future Motion is anti-consumer, haptic feedback is overdue, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the Onewheel. Every nosedive is ultimately due to rider error.

Hold on, I’ll be ready to take my board out as soon as I figure out what’s wrong with my xorg.conf…

It’s challenging for many businesses because they worry they are one bad incident away from bankruptcy while also knowing that their staff is not perfect.

They assume they are shipping bugs and in some cases they are intentionally shipping bugs to make deadlines. It’s scary for a business to decide to make those bugs public even though most of us know the end result is better product quality and higher social capital.

> I guess it would make clones easier but I hear there’s already third party open source code for onewheels so they can’t prevent it.

I suspect a lot of the fear of open source is driven by the uncertainty of how big the "easier" in this sentence is.

On the competitors side, what if it's currently taking up 90% of your competitor's time just to understand what you're doing and make a rough not-quite-as-good imitation, whereas if it was open source that time drops to 5% leaving them much more scope to improve on top?

Plus, there's fear about security too. Sure nobody should rely on security by obscurity, but that doesn't mean it can't be a helpful thing and what if hackers spend more time reviewing the code you release than friendly bug finders do? I personally have no idea if there's any data on whether OSS has better, the same, or worse track record on average for being hacked, or if there've been studies on how often hacks happen with or without source code being available, etc. but regardless of the actual odds, it feels like the business equivalent of leaving your house's front door open 24/7, so it can be an emotional argument as much as anything.

And like you said, the current default expectation is closed source as default, so the decision makers find safety in making the choice that feels less risky unless they can be sure it will bring big enough positives to be worth it.

> But if the mainline code was open source, some engineer would spend three weeks chasing down these bugs and submitting patches and everyone would benefit.

That assumes that the problem is buggy code, isn't it? What if it is buggy hardware? What if it is the electronics that is glitching out?

The Segway, at least originally, had considerable redundancy in the control system. I think they had four gyros and four accelerometers arranged in a tetrahedron. If you have four set up that way, you can get out info for all three principal axes, plus an error value that indicates sensor trouble. So failure can be detected quickly.

Does the one-wheel have that?

I ride my bike, a lot. And I got passed once or twice a week for about a year by a guy on one of these that I assume was modified because it would go at least 25-30mph. No helmet on and he’d pretty belligerently pass me and pedestrians with little margin. Then I didn’t see him anymore.

They can also be extremely fun!

It’s unfortunate that so many people fail to recognize the inherent danger and choose to blame the device instead of their abilities.

Anyone who can’t control their balance on the fulcrum of a kart tire — under their own muscle power — trying to go fast on one of these boards is outright reckless.

I didn’t mean for what I said to be a sweeping statement for everyone, but I see why you might have interpreter it that way.

I only meant that it would have been the best commuting tool for me.

I can second that a Brompton is an awesome city bike. I had one in Boston, and besides the aforementioned utility, it got compliments from people from every possible demographic. They put a smile on damn near everyone's faces.

Get a good pair of padded gloves though. The small, high pressure tires are a punishing ride over shitty pavement. I.e., the kind that's found everywhere in Boston.

It’s very likely that the hardware and/or firmware was not designed to meet a quality standard appropriate for the associated customer risks.

If they don’t go bankrupt!

That is a promo, not an apology, or even recognition of a problem.

Feels like they had to do something, so they essentially did nothing enough to call it something.

For others who didn't read the article (I hadn't when I saw this comment), the store credit is only for owners of older boards, which cannot be 'fixed' with the software update that they're rolling out.

> For early adopters, however, owners can receive a “pro-rated credit of $100 to the purchase of a new board,” according to Mudd. The credit will only be issued after owners confirm that they have disposed of the old model.

This comment is a humorous remark that implies that the person who wrote it is so old and fragile that even looking at a skateboard (one of these fuckers) caused them to lose their ability to use hyphens in their writing. Hyphens are punctuation marks that are used to join words or parts of words, such as in "middle-aged" or "liquor-sales person". The comment is exaggerating the effect of aging and skateboarding on the person's health and grammar. It is also a self-deprecating joke that mocks the person's own lack of hyphens in their comment.

Thanks LLM!

I think you can guess. I specifically wear a BMX helmet.

Probably something like this. [1] I've used them when rollerblading and snowboarding.

1: https://www.rei.com/product/875825/dakine-wrist-guards

>that site is Chinese language with weird popups

That site is tiktok or rather the Chinese version of it.

Reminded me of this too. But luckily those 737 max8 got a software update (and a new name) and are happily flying again...

That was not a software bug, but a bad design from a dysfunctional organization that had long since stopped valuing sound engineering.

No, it's not all or nothing. Good engineering is simple, relies on less, and trusts less -- it doesn't require trusting zero.

I also addressed the difference in the comment -- this type of software has no end-user / operator repair, and the costs of failure are great.

I know how a bike works, and I can repair it. (Time-tested materials like steel frames are also nice.)

I don't know how the OneWheel works. In theory, I might be able to read some of the source code, but that counts for very little. It's certainly more complex than a bike. It also hasn't been tested over a long period of time.

Well it looks like we've had a test... I haven't touched a OneWheel since I first saw them 5 years ago, and now it seems like I have some good info about them.

The test of time works!

>And unless you’re paying $Ks of dollars the manufacturing quality is sadly going down.

Nope, especially if you’re paying $Ks of dollars the manufacturing quality is sadly going down.

Totally not, I can take a bicycle into my workshop, check if is made of steel or aluminium, inspect quality of hardware, I can test quality of a weld, hit it with a hammer, etc..

You can't see source code of onewheel, or take out the firmware and run it in isolation.

Software producing companies have the privileges of being protected from inspection, but responsibility of a guy assembling Ikea furniture.

NASA’s code runs on devices that have am very specific missions. They can test all of the edge cases because they’re going from A to B once and they have a decade to prepare that journey. People riding electric scooters and etc will run into more variability each day than NASA will in a whole mission.

I crashed and broke my back on a two wheeled scooter in SF due to a pedestrian walking on a red don’t walk sign, for example.

Plus, none of these companies are doing NASA quality assurance or anything close, so why even compare them to NASA?

The thing is this code only has to do one very simple function. It should be a few hundred lines at most. It's easily within the realm of formal verification.

I guess they always thought they didn't need it...

I'm familiar with similar can't-fail applications in industrial controls engineering. Safety-critical software usually only means enough watchdogs, counters, and checksums that you can be confident everything will shut down if something's not right.

But the Onewheel is a harder problem - you must continue to run even if something goes wrong! There are some industrial processes that are run continuous, you must not ever stop that pump or furnace or the molten metal will solidify or sewage will back up into people's homes or things will otherwise go very, very wrong. To deal with that, you need at the very least one-out-of-two function, redundant heterogeneous parallel motor drivers and IMUs in the Onewheel for example. Most plants - even big automotive lines, where an isolated fault can cost tens of thousands of dollars per hour - do not go to that enormous effort and expense. A consumer product never will.

I feel like this is an engineering cultural issue. Few organizations can produce safety-critical code, say organizations who focus on tail events and long term profitability. And an engineering organization cannot transition from a growth oriented shipit culture to a safety-critical culture.

Just to clarify, they are not just now adding feedback about reaching the limits of the board. Since day one they have had “pushback” which tilts the board backwards in a very noticeable way to let the rider know that a limit (speed, power, torque, battery, temperature) is about to be reached. Unfortunately many, maybe even most riders intentionally ignore this warning and forcibly “push through” the pushback. This update just makes the warning much more annoying in an attempt to change rider behavior.

Seems it would be easier and more effective to handle this at the source.

Set some minimum standards for the products and require a bond or insurance for them to be sold.

We already set standards for other vehicles and safety critical products (FAA, FMVSS, UL listing, etc). The minimum standards makes a case for culpability through negligence relatively easy.

Requiring a bond or insurance means either betting a substantial amount of your own resources on the fact that you have done correctly, or convincing an insurance company (who are demonstrably passable at assessing risk based on their still being in business) to assess the likelihood of payouts and price your premiums accordingly. If you can’t convince them you made this safe, you won’t be able to afford to put it on the market.

Then instead of expecting somehow that OneWheel is going to cooperate with audits they have no real incentive to participate in, consumers in aggregate to make informed, rational decisions, and a bunch of other things that are unlikely to happen… (The insurance company is just going to base rates on aggregate historical data like they do with cars. Some of you may need to die so we can determine whether the products are safe. Best of luck.) People can just go buy products at the store and be relatively confident that they’re not going to kill them.

I’d wager that markets are generally healthier when people have confidence that generally available products aren’t dangerous. I can only imagine how little I’d purchase if instead of electrical standards and UL listing I had to go talk to my home insurer every time I wanted to plug something else into the wall so I could find out if it was going to kill my family.

Why do people get in cabs with crazy cab drivers? There's even a game called "Crazy Taxi"

Because they are confident that the cab driver doesn't want to kill HIMSELF. If he behaves recklessly, he'll face consequences

That is, self-driving cars with remote operators are a moral hazard. If they make a mistake, the operator doesn't face any consequences

This is not a trivial point. If you look deeply into causation, you'll see it in many places

---

Likewise, Tesla's policies of forcing your hands on the wheel are incoherent. They claim to drive you around, except that it's your fault if something goes wrong. Well, that's exactly where I wanted the help.

Definitely check out "Skin in the Game" by Taleb if you haven't

I predict that this will become a recognized limitation of AI. In 10 or 20 years, we'll realize that it was a philosophically incoherent position to claim that a machine is doing something, WITHOUT being liable for the consequences of performing poorly.

And not just incoherent, but bad engineering. Without this vital feedback, it won't operate well, and it won't learn. In evolution, which is the process that has produced machines capable of navigating the world (us), death is a very strong piece of feedback!

Since we’ve not heard stories of it being involved in deaths I assume that the battery stops providing propulsion score it stops providing gyro. (And depending on how the gyro is designed it might keep spinning long enough for it to slow down and stop.)

> What happens to a Segway when it runs out of battery?

A Segway needs electricity to balance itself, so my guess is that when it gets close to running out of battery, it stops by itself and refuses to continue.

The Segway has redundant control circuitry, motor windings, and battery. If there is a failure of any of these I believe it will fault and perform a controlled stop.

One of the reasons the Segway was so expensive is they built it like medical devices, with tons of redundancies in its systems for this exact reason. So if one computer glitched out it wouldn’t just chuck its passenger head over heels.

As we know, once hoverboards got really popular the cheap ones (perhaps most?) were NOT built that way. I saw someone nearly faceplant when theirs ran out of battery and stopped on a dime.

My ninebot scooter (maybe not what you're asking, but it's a Segway product) slows down until it can't carry you anymore. First it just can no longer achieve the maximum velocity, then soon it can no longer reach standard speed, and then you're limping along at 4mph and you can no longer climb any grade without pushing. Finally you're pushing.

It's not particularly usable as a scooter without the battery.

The motor doesn't have to disengage; when unpowered it turns into a freewheel. The onewheel is perfectly capable of coasting, that's not what causes the crash.

It's the stance of the rider (leaning forward) combined with the sudden lack of acceleration from the motor which disrupts the equilibrium of forces and causes the ensemble to tip forward -- then it all comes to an abrupt stop because the leading edge digs into the ground.

I just bought an electric longboard with large, all-terrain wheels - not for off-roading, but so I don't have to worry so much about the gravel and potholes on poorly-maintained Seattle streets. Seems to work well, so far - I can ride right down the unpaved gravel alleyway behind my house, even. You can still feel the bumps and ruts, but you just roll right along, there's none of the lurching you get with smaller wheels.

Ebikes are both fun and practical, but I don't know where I'd store one during the work day; the skateboard can just come up the elevator with me.

Were you looking at razor-style scooters? Before that brand came up with their tiny scooters, pretty much all scooters had wheels around the diameter of these Onewheels. It's why back then we distinguished them as "scooters" vs "razors", while nowadays people seem to mean razor-style when they say "scooters"...

60mm 79a skateboard wheels here. I go over gravel all the time. Sometimes even loose dirt paths. Patchy asphalt. Cobblestones and brick. Momentum is your friend here as well, faster you go more likely the board chucks out the obstruction. It takes quite a stone to stop these wheels, probably one that would pinch flat my bike inner tube and certainly one that would be very hard to miss unless I was not paying attention. I'm comfortable enough with the small rock situation to even eat breakfast or lunch on occasion while on the board.

> Nitpick: sliding is a pretty rare way to stop on a longboard.

To explain for anyone unaware, I primarily footbrake to stop on my longboard - you put one foot out and hold it against the ground and the friction slows you down.

> It feels like there's just no way to bail, since there's a big stick in front of you

Ironically, the most ridiculous and most common way to hurt yourself on a scooter is to bail instead of continuing to ride the perfectly good scooter. You can find hundreds of videos on YouTube of people who upon seeing an obstacle just confidently step off the scooter (still going 15 mph) and eat dirt 0.5 seconds later instead of using the brake and safely stopping almost immediately (these usually brake just fine).

I dunno, scooters and bikes have mechanical brakes so there is no need to bail to begin with.

Sliding is rare, true. But at high speeds is the only way to stop. At low speeds I do agree, but the issue is that footbraking requires balance, and even people decent at long boarding can lose control while footbraking.

My main argument against longboard is that there’s no way to stop at high speeds and that steering inherently requires shifting your weight in a way that makes you vulnerable.

This is not to say that no one should longboard, but personally I only do so on flat terrain now.

I don't think there's a good way to bail from a bike, but I can't think of a situation I've been in on a bike where bailing would have been a good choice.

There's more chance of bailing if you're on an undersized bike (bmx style) or maybe on a step through design rather than a straight top tube. But I still don't know where you'd apply that; maybe at a skate park, but not on a road and I don't think on a trail either.

Luckily, mine are all the cheap Shimano ones. This is their top stuff isn’t it?

The warning system seems insufficient to say the least? Usually there's a hardware fix.

Thanks for the pointer; for anyone similarly interested, there's a post in that forum showing the build log https://pev.dev/t/diy-onewheel-build-review/918 and they report:

> Overall I would highly recommend going through with this build. It feels pretty close to the real thing and is a fraction of the cost. The build got a little frustrating at some points but that’s just part of the learning process. The board is a bit large which is kind of annoying.

but I didn't read the whole thing in order to know how much experience they came into that project already possessing (or, of course, supporting tools)

One also wonders how many 3rd party deaths were caused by cars, as opposed to the virtually zero for the foreseeable future from these sorts of devices.

Pretty classic holier than thou commentary from HN, for sure.

> they have big wheels which provide stability via the gyroscopic effect

The gyroscopic effect is negligible on a bicycle and it isn’t even what provides stability to it (it’s mostly the front fork and steering geometry). It’s more noticeable on a motorbike at highway speeds, but it still doesn’t act on it in an entirely desirable way.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_dynam...

As if hitting your head in a tree or rocky path can’t kill you. Isn’t “off road” usually a higher bar for say a car or bicycle than using them on the road?

Thank you for your detailed response. I completely agree that certain standards for a safety critical system should be met for when these devices go out of the factory!

Regarding BMS safety, the reason for removing control of the discharge path is that the device should always prioritize the safety of the user while riding. Instead of dropping the user to the pavement, pushback and audio alerts should be done to alert the user that one of the cells is having a voltage issue, or the pack is getting too hot. Bypassing the BMS's discharge does not effect charge protection, which is the main scenario of what would cause the battery to catch on fire and burn your house down.

In fact, Future Motion DISABLED BEING ABLE TO READ INDIVIDUAL CELL VOLTAGES TO MONITOR THE SAFETY OF THE PACK in an effort to restrict 3rd parties from building batteries. Another anti-consumer decision was the GT having 6.5" non-standard rims in an effort to corner the tire after market. Larger rim size is actually bad for riding characteristics and the right move from an engineering perspective would have been to go smaller actually (the float life is working on 5" hubs)

Yes, I get that having a OneWheel catch on fire impacts their brand, but there's multiple other issues with these devices and quite a number of anti-R2R which is not acting in good faith for users safety, and again, the actual dangerous scenarios are when a cell gets over-charged which the BMS is still there for to enforce. :)

Regarding R2R there's people all around the world who ride these devices, and sending the board into their only location in Cali just isn't an appropriate solution. Unfortunately FM has been very strict on enforcing patents (even though they didn't technically invent the self balancing skateboard as there is prior art) and they have created a anti-competitive, anti-consumer market.

I would absolutely love a safer device that meets the safety standards and certifications you mention, and I hope there can be a path forward where I don't have to build these myself. I'm lazy. I don't exactly enjoy this type of work on my board (I'd rather be riding). I do it out of necessity.

Fair point

I couldn't prove that mine was defective, I was more convinced that mine was working as it was designed, which is inherently dangerous.