Posted on 02/23/2003 6:35:35 PM PST by SamAdams76
Edited on 06/29/2004 7:09:44 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Inventor Dean Kamen promised that his superscooter would change the world. Then reality hit - hard.
It would be premature to call the most talked about scooter in the history of humankind a huge bust. But the Segway has always been ahead of its time. For a decade, Dean Kamen fiddled and tested and tinkered with his invention, finally stage-managing its public unveiling in December 2001. He figured 2002 would be the year that the Segway Human Transporter launched a transportation revolution. Executives at companies like FedEx and Amazon.com would behold his high tech superscooter and wonder how they'd managed all these years without it. The US Postal Service and police departments across the nation would overwhelm the company with orders. And behind Segway's institutional customers, Kamen envisioned a long line of consumers from around the globe, checkbooks in hand. Maybe not all 6 billion of us would clamor at once to own one, but to him that seemed only a matter of time. After all, he was hawking the Segway as not merely a faster way to get from here to there but also a solution to urban congestion, air pollution, and dependency on fossil fuel. To prepare for the onslaught, Kamen leased a 77,000-square-foot factory near his home in Manchester, New Hampshire,and began puzzling through the logistics of running round-the-clock shifts. He hired scores of lobbyists, who spent much of last year trying to persuade state legislatures to rewrite their laws to permit his scooter to operate on city sidewalks. Before he'd sold a single one, Kamen blithely forecast that by the end of 2002, his enterprise would be stamping out 10,000 machines a week. Meanwhile, his best-known backer, venture capitalist John Doerr, predicted Segway would rack up $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history.
(Excerpt) Read more at wired.com ...
The dork factor is pretty high. I laughed out loud to see Niles Crane tool around on one on Frazier.
Let's say I am an attorney in private practice whose office is 8 blocks from the courthouse. Just where do I park this so that I know it will be there, and in good condition, after my court appearance? They don't let you take these inside the courthouse (with metal detectors and security up the ying yang these days), and I must have missed seeing the Segway (bike-like) rack outside the building to which I could chain mine.
Kamen might be a technology genius, but he didn't conduct $100 worth of focus groups before launching this turkey. If he had, he would have scrapped his production and marketing plans until he got it to go 25 mph and run for hours on a single charge, and cost about $800. The skate board crowd might have gone for 'em then.
Here's my free advice: go indoors. Ninety per cent of the problems with this thing have to do with distance and the elements. There are plenty of indoor settings where the ability to move at 4x the speed of walking would pay for one of these things fairly quickly. I've been in factories where it's a ten-minute walk from one end to the other. Somebody mentioned airports as another obvious one. Hospitals are another. Big distribution centers could use these things for stock-pickers. In all those settings, the Segway could be sitting in a charger station when not being used, so the whole battery-life thing goes away, too. I think he should forget about re-shaping the urban landscape and ask where he can find expensive people walking fair distances indoors. |
Too bad, because there are a lot of partially handicapped people who could use this technology for shopping and such.
I suspect the Chinese could make one for $500, and might yet. Someone mentioned mopeds. I suspect the motor technology could be used to power a moped. No a bad thing for short commutes.
And two, if I were at Cedar Point and some punk kid ran up the back of me on one of those 50 pound contraptions, I'd be going to the hospital and my lawyer.
But Kamen deserves credit for his successes, I hope he isn't looking for government bailouts, I'd be damn disappointed.
They forgot to build in overhead luggage compartments in the Segway.
The manufacturer cannot possibly prevent all cases of the forward-falling crash that was reported in this thread. It can avoid most of them, but not enough to make the machine truly safe. The man in this accident was lucky. A forward-falling crash at 12 mph could be fatal. The rider's feet and probably his hands would be caught up in the handlebars; he might take the impact on his head.
Also - renting in some national parks. And in the Caribbean when you get off the cruise ship and walk around in the hot sun doing tourist shopping - another good place for rentals.
There are specialized areas where these things will pay. If they focus on those areas they will make money. If not - they're go broke and someone else will pay royalties for the patent rights then then they'll do it.
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