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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

During my brief stint with longboarding, I found that tumbling (as taught in gymnastics, martial arts, parkour, etc) is quite useful for a high speed unplanned dismount. That would be applicable here too. However, my stint with longboarding was brief because less than 100% of crashes led to a successful tumble.

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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.

Wait what? I mean I agree about being able to fractionally run it out (I spilled at full speed when i first rode one of these and came out mostly fine because of a decade of skating) but there's no way that these are more dangerous than bikes or scooters. There are way more ways to get tangled/impaled (not usually literally, but more ways to have crash force concentrated in a smaller area) when crashing a bike/scooter.

Scooter I can kind of see the argument for. But bike not so much. Assuming we’re talking peddle bikes here, then they’re naturally self stabilising, and capable of far heavier breaking than a One Wheel is.

A One Wheel requires quite a lot of active balance from the user, a bike requires some balance, but hard cornering on a bike, or slamming the breaks on hard don’t generally result in unplanned dismounts, even with amateur bike riders. A One Wheel on the other hand, even experienced riders will still end up doing unplanned dismounts when performing rapid unexpected manoeuvres (such when avoiding another vehicle or pothole).

It’s only anecdata, but I’ve personally never had a serious unplanned dismount on a bike (after thousands of hours), and includes while mountain biking. I’ve have had a couple of nasty unplanned dismounts on a One Wheel just riding around a park. I suspect broader stats (assuming anyone’s even collected them) would probably find that my experiences of each mode of transport is pretty representative.

Been a long time and the link is lost but I saw a California DOT study that had Italian style scooters as dangerous as bicycles. It's at odds with what motorcyclists think. Also at odds the risk from motorcycles goes up sharply with displacement.

My personal experience was all dismounts from bicycles lead to bruises if that. And friends crashing at high speed tend to end up with hand and wrist injuries. Flip side I have three friends that needed knee surgery after stand up scooter accidents.

So I agree the typical dismount is really important.

That's a fair point, in terms of the odds of an incident being bad I would say scooters and bikes are more dangerous, but the odds of an incident happening at all on the onewheel is much more likely .

Onewheel flios, your head huts the ground. Hitting the ground with your head us rare in a bicycle

I think I would agree that you can probably have a much worse incident on bike vs a One Wheel. A bike allows you reach effectively unlimited speeds (provided you can find a big enough hill and tail wind), which brings with it uncapped risk.

But I think for most average bike riders, people who just ride a bike to get from A to B, rather than for sport (more speed always means more risk, at certain point I agree a bike becomes inherently more dangerous just due to the higher speeds). The odds of them having a bad incident on a bike is much lower than on a One Wheel. It’s quite hard to have an incident on a bike that results in a guaranteed head injury (please wear a helmet, it only takes a single bad head injury to ruin your life), whereas it’s quite hard to avoid a head injury from a One Wheel incident. Most bike related incidents (where someone isn’t just riding into a stationary object, in which case I don’t think the mode of transport matters much) result in the bikes wheel slipping out from under you, the consequence is moderately slowed, but quite painful fall sideways. The time it takes the bike to fall out from under you gives you a bit of time to prepare for the impact. All this assumes reasonable low speeds (not much faster than a run), due to non-sport based riding.

On a One Wheel or similar, dismounts tend to result in full bodied face plants. If you’re not able to come of the device, and catch yourself by running, then you tend to go face first to the pavement, and there’s nothing slowing you down. No bike frame or similar sliding across the ground and buying you time, just a whole load of empty air between your head and the ground.

I've been on a motorcycle that had the drivetrain cut out at 80mph. The bike coasted safely to a stop.

You lose drive power on a one wheel and your biology is immediately meeting physics.

The wheel doesn’t have inertia?

The motor is holding the nose up. When you lose power, the nose immediately dives into the ground, stopping the onewheel, but not the rider.

If the rider is actively balancing then it doesn’t need to immediately nosedive. In reality that’s the usual effect, but keeping a low center of gravity and trying to keep it balanced go a long way toward a smoother slide/roll instead of a faceplant.

The rider leans forward to accelerate the OneWheel, so they are not "actively balancing" - the OneWheel self-balances "against" their lean. Until the motor gives out, that is.

Simply carving , which is how you turn, requires some balancing by the rider. Going fast over anything but ideal terrain also requires active balancing. If you ride one in any capacity beyond a few mph in a parking lot, you’ll feel it in your legs.

I owned one!

That's really unbelievable - an unacceptable mode of failure. How are they not in jail or sued to oblivion? What engineer put their name on it?

I suspect it has more to do with the active balancing on the thing stopping from one moment to the other. You’d just tip forward before you can react.

It’s very rare that bicycle is going to mechanically fail and send you flying.

Short of the time I was hit by a car, I’ve never had a bicycling emergency — road or mountain — that I wasn’t able to walk away from through some combination of hoping obstacles and/or putting the bike down in a controlled side-skid.

That might be true unless your knee buckles or foot sticks blowing out your knee, acl, mcl, cartilidge which happened to me at 9mph. Luckily I only sprained the MCL for the 3rd time.

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