Nobody seems to remember how the Segway was going to change our world, backed by many of the VC power figures at the time + Steve Jobs.
The engineering behind it was really quite nice, but the hype set it up to fail. If it hasn’t been talked up so much in the media, the launch wouldn’t have felt so flat. There was no way for them to live up to the hype.
Electric micromobility is a pretty huge driver of how people negotiate the modern city. Self-balancing segways, e-skate, e-bike and scooters are all pretty big changes that we are seeing in many modern cityscapes.
Hell, a shared electric bike was just used as a getaway vehicle for an assassination in NYC.
e-skate and segways are non-factors. And that's the difference between a good product (ebike or even just plain old bikeshare) and a bad one (segway).
People wants to die in style so much that they turn blind eyes to plasticky scooters and Nissan Leafs. To them, the ugly attempt don't exist, and the reskinned clones are the first evers in the history. But reality prevails. Brits aren't flying EE Lightning jets anymore.
Segways were kind of cool to me too, to be fair. To lesser extent Lime scooters too. Sort of. But they're still just sideways pizza bikes.
(I’m not familiar with the site in general, but I think there’s no reason for them to lie about the date, and electric vehicles always show up surprisingly early).
https://reallygoodebikes.com/blogs/electric-bike-blog/histor...
Close but no LSD
"Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder, predicted that in future cities would be designed around the device, while Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, also backed the project publicly and financially."