I think the lack of being able to carry things, and the importance of that, cannot be overstated

Especially at the time when the Segway was being introduced, 50% of the population could not buy clothing with pockets that would hold a wallet

How do you carry your purse on that thing? Let alone your child and a couple bags of groceries?

And, if the thing had a reasonable range, what percentage of people are comfortable standing up all the way across town?

Scooters came in after messenger bags, which is a big deal. Many of them have baskets on the front. You can put one bag of groceries, although probably not two, on the platform between your feet. I wouldn't recommend putting a baby there...

I use a powered wheelchair to get around town, I live micro transit.

Keeping it real, the president of the company accidentally died riding one, that's not great press.

I've ridden a segway and if you've done something like surfing it's pretty intuitive, but by the same token people get the wobbles, particularly when they are stressed.

You can't go grocery shopping on one, you can't bring your kid with you like you can with a bike trailer, there's range anxiety (trust me, range anxiety is REAL).

If I'm in my wheelchair (or you're on a bike) and there is a kid running around, or someone is crossing the street carrying a big thing, in my chair or on a bike I can very reliably stop and not move. Staying in place on a segway is a continuous process.

There are also a lot of places I can't go in my wheelchair that you couldn't get to on a segway either.

The person I know who loved his used it to commute to and from his white collar job along a bike path, which it did well.

Certainly Segway's success at building hype and failure to deliver on it didn't help move us forward but it's really hard for me to gauge how far it set us back. I don't think anyone could have made a good alternative until lithium ion batteries got a bit better and a lot cheaper. And when that happened in the mid twenty-teens, we did see a Cambrian explosion of e-bikes, one-wheels, electric skateboards, battery powered scooters, hoverboards, etc.

Your last sentence is wrong: I mocked it mercilessly at the time, and now wonder whether I should have done a better job spotting the good direction buried in the bad product.

But really, all the hoverboards, onewheels, etc. are the Segway successors and you see tons of them.

> the Segeay bombed made investors skittish

This exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.

Good inventions happen when the underlying technology is mature enough to support them. The Segway didn't fail to vanguard the micromobility revolution because influencers thought it was dorky; the Segway failed because the underlying technology wasn't cheap and small and lightweight.

If Segway had done a successful marketing campaign to somehow make Segways cool; and they had launched Segway 2.0 with the underlying design flaws fixed (move the wheels inline, lose the gyro) it STILL would have been expensive, short-range, and heavy. Because battery technology was not even close to ready.

You're lending way too much weight to the idea that we got scared of looking dorky.

And losing money so the winning scooter outfits run at a state subsidized loss to make them available for everybody almost for free

Then Uber would’ve been all over the place and gotten some competition and maybe after some improvements taken off

Isn't the problem with Segway type devices that they are risky for the user on the road but dangerous for everyone else on the pavement? Similar to scooters which were banned in the town centre where I live as a result of interacting badly with pedestrians.

It was and still is a revolutionary product for accessibility, but definitely did not benefit from the lambasting of the Segway.

Maybe it’s a chicken-egg thing. Maybe capitalism is not in fact all that amazing at discovering and satisfying preferences.

Good lines of thought to chew on!

Also worth mentioning that a lot of Kamen's messaging at the time was along these lines, that electrified personal transportation could change the world in substantial ways, it just happened that Segway was the *only* version in existence.

Epstein also discussed in his emails people he knew who, as guests of Kamen, attended events for Kamen's youth robotics org.

For all the good Kamen did for the world with his intentions, it's well past time to separate the man from his work.

This may well be the case — though I do suspect that tech might have advanced faster if investors & the public believed in the applications sooner