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I said I agreed with you why it would probably fail. Yes, plugging in the sucker in the middle of nowhere is a problem.

But you don't go repelling down a cliff without sufficient rope either. Or hiking without water. Pick an analogy.

Yes, the gyros need power to keep it upright. Not too much you can do about that, except to be in a position to not to be on it when the juice expires.

The assumption of no common sense is but another nail in the coffin of what used to be a pretty good society.

But with the Segway's limited range, and severe problem with hills (a few months ago one was taken up some big hill and given the number of battery changes it looked like a 30% grade resulted in about 90% degredation of efficiency) it's practical range is still guess work. So running out of juice, especially when still learning the device's capabilities, could be fairly common place. Same kind of thing happened with early cars, and people STILL run out of gas sometimes even decades later.

But there IS something they could have done (and are now doing) to make running out of juice graceful instead of potentially catostrophic. All you've got to do is make the dumb thing freewheel instead of locking up, if you want to get really cool you can have it expend the final juice slowing and swinging upright before going into freewheel mode.

The lack of common sense here is all at Segway. They built a device that couldn't gracefully stop when running out of juice. It's not a terribly difficult puzzle to work out and should have been done in DESIGN time, not after mass production and distribution.

Gyros do not keep it upright. They only are sensors that detect the acceleration of the device. The main motors are servo'ed by the control system that receives signals from the gyros keeping the device stable. The gyros in this case are MEMS devices that are solid state. They are a derivation of the accelerometers used in airbag deployment systems in cars. FYI

>>>The assumption of no common sense is but another nail in the coffin of what used to be a pretty good society. <<<

A cup of McDonald's coffee - $1.27.
A cup of McDonald's coffee in a devious lady's lap - $4.0 million.
"The assumption of no common sense is but another nail in the coffin of what used to be a pretty good society. ".....Priceless!