Okay, let's unpack this. I want to start with
a concept that we see all the time in the history
of technology, but we rarely give it a name.
It's called the innovation paradox. And it's
this, you know, frustrating, fascinating idea
that you can build a piece of engineering that
is... objectively miraculous something that basically
defies physics something that feels like actual
magic yeah a technical marvel a total marvel
and yet as a consumer product it can be a complete
and total disaster it's the classic better mousetrap
that nobody actually wants to buy You build the
perfect machine, but you completely forget to
ask if anyone actually needs it or can afford
it. Exactly. And there is no better example of
this, I mean none, than the subject of our deep
dive today. This is the textbook case. It really
is. We are looking at a device that was predicted
to be, and this is a real quote from a very,
very smart person, bigger than the Internet.
It's an incredible quote. Not bigger than the
iPhone or the PC. Bigger than the Internet. And
that prediction was made by John Doerr, who is,
you know, one of the most successful venture
capitalists in history. This wasn't some random
guy. He put $80 million of his fund's money into
this idea before the public ever even saw it.
$80 million. And he wasn't the only one either.
The hype was immense. We are talking, of course,
about the segue. The one and only. Now, I know
what you're probably thinking. Today, if you
say segue, what comes to mind? Mall cops. Mall
cops, yeah. Or tourists. Tourists in Rome wearing
matching, like... Bright yellow helmets just
waddling through a piazza. Or that scene in Arrested
Development with Gob. It's become a joke. It's
a punchline. It's a psych gag. But our mission
today is to really strip away all the jokes and
look at the reality. Because the story of the
Segway is actually this incredible story about
the most advanced robotics of the early 2000s.
Absolutely. A genuinely tragic corporate history.
I mean, involving the death of the company's
owner. Which is a story that's just unbelievable
on its own. And a bizarre afterlife where the
brand is now selling like high -speed off -road
vehicles. It is a wild ride. We're going from
this secret code named Ginger all the way to
a modern vehicle that's literally called the
supervillain. The supervillain. It's amazing.
So let's dive into the source material. We are
pulling from... The original patent filings,
the corporate history of Segway Inc., biographical
records of its inventor, Dean Kamen, and of course,
the technical schematics of the dynamic stabilization
system. And to really get why this thing failed,
you have to understand just how high the expectations
were. It's crucial. We have to go back to the
beginning. So you have to transport yourself
back. We're talking late 90s, early 2000s. Right.
The dot -com bubble is peaking or just about
to burst. And technology is seen as this like
messianic force that is going to fix everything
in society. Total techno -optimism. Exactly.
And the word gets out that Dean Kamen, who was
already a legend, I mean, he invented the portable
dialysis machine, the Ibiot wheelchair. A legitimate
genius. A total genius. Word gets out he's working
on something secret, something huge. And this
is where the mystery of Ginger comes in. That
was the code name, right? Right. The two code
names were Ginger and even more simply, IT. IT.
Yeah. And the hype machine really, really started
when a book proposal about the invention was
leaked. A book proposal? Not even the device
itself? No, a proposal for a book about the device.
And the leak didn't say what the machine was.
It didn't say it's a fancy scooter. It just...
quoted these titans of industry who had seen
it in secret. OK, so we mentioned John Doerr,
but Steve Jobs, this Steve Jobs, he saw it. He
did. And at least initially, Jobs said it was,
and I quote, as big a deal as the PC. As big
a deal as the PC. Jeff Bezos took a look at it
early on. He was involved. You have to understand
the kind of pressure cooker this creates in Silicon
Valley and in the media. Oh, for sure. When you
have the founders of Apple and Amazon telling
the world that something is going to fundamentally
change the structure of cities, I mean, what
do you even imagine? The public imagination just
went wild. I remember this so vividly. People
were speculating it was a hydrogen engine that
was going to solve the energy crisis. Yeah, or
an anti -gravity device. People seriously thought
it might be some kind of hover technology. Or
actual teleportation. That was a real theory
floating around. It sounds funny now, but people
genuinely thought that. The expectations were
set at, like, redefine human civilization. Nothing
less. And the cultural impact was so huge, so
immediate, that South Park actually devoted an
entire episode to making fun of the hype. Before
it even launched. Before anyone knew what it
was. That's such a crucial detail. The episode
was just about IT, this mysterious invention,
and they portrayed it as this world -altering
device that let you travel instantly. Of course,
being South Park, the interface was, well, let's
just say it was incredibly uncomfortable and
involved some very invasive controls. Right,
but the point stands. When you are being parodied
on national television for your hype cycle before
you have shipped a single unit... You are in
dangerous territory. You've set the bar at impossible.
You have to deliver a miracle. Exactly. If you
come out with anything less than a warp drive
at that point, people are going to be disappointed.
And they did not come out with a warp drive.
No, they did not. So the bubble has to burst
eventually. The curtain has to come up. And it
finally did on December 3rd, 2001. A date that
was supposed to go down in history. You know,
alongside the launch of the Model T, Ford, or
the Wright Brothers' first flight, that was the
level they were aiming for. The location, Bryant
Park, New York City. The platform, Good Morning
America. Prime time. Dean Kamen goes on live
TV and outrolls the Segway HT. HT. Yeah. Which
stood for human transporter. Right. Later they
would change it to PT for personal transporter.
It's a subtle but important shift. And let's
just talk about the name for a second. Segway.
It sounds like Segway. S -E -G -U -E, which,
you know, means a smooth transition. Exactly.
A smooth transition from walking to, well. To
writing. It was clever branding. But as the sources
note, the name Segway is a registered trademark.
They really leaned into that concept of fluid,
effortless movement. So they unveil it. And it's
this, this two -wheeled platform with a handlebar.
And the first thing everyone watching at home
notices is that it doesn't tip over. That was
the magic trick. That is the absolute core of
the engineering. Yeah. And frankly, you know.
Regardless of the sales figures or the cultural
impact, the engineering is spectacular. We really
need to appreciate what they achieved here. So
how did they do it? Well, the source material
explains that the dynamics of the Segway are
similar to a classic control problem in robotics
known as the inverted pendulum. Okay, let's unpack
inverted pendulum for the non -engineers listening
because this is the fundamental concept behind
the whole machine. For sure. Think about balancing
a broomstick on the palm of your hand. You've
probably done this as a kid, right? Oh, yeah,
definitely. The broomstick wants to fall over.
Gravity is pulling it down constantly. So to
keep it upright, you have to constantly move
your hand. Right. If it starts leaning forward,
you have to quickly move your hand forward to
get back under the center of gravity. Exactly.
If it leans back, you move your hand back. You're
constantly making these tiny, tiny adjustments.
You are, and you're doing it instinctively. Your
eyes see the lean, your brain processes it instantly,
and your arm just moves. Right. But with the
Segway, the machine has to do all of that for
you. It has to act as the hand, and you the rider,
you're the broomstick. But doing that mechanically
with motors and sensors back in 2001, that was
incredibly difficult. It was state -of -the -art.
The Segway uses these powerful brushless DC electric
motors, one in each wheel, to constantly adjust
the position of the wheels to keep the whole
platform. And you, upright. So if I lean forward,
the wheels spin forward to catch me. Instantly.
And if you lean back, they spin backward. It's
a constant high -speed balancing act. But how
does it know? I mean, how does it know I'm leaning
forward and not just, you know, standing on a
hill? Sensors. A whole sophisticated array of
sensors. The sources detail that it used a combination
of tilt sensors and, crucially, gyroscopic sensors.
And these weren't just parts you could buy at
RadioShack. Oh, not at all. And here's an amazing
detail. These sensors were developed by the Advanced
Technology Center of BAE Systems. BAE Systems,
the massive defense and aerospace company, the
guys who build fighter jets. The very same. This
wasn't consumer electronics grade stuff. This
was high -grade aerospace technology being applied
to a sidewalk scooter. They used what are called
solid -state silicon gyroscopes. Okay, what is
a solid -state gyroscope? When I think of a gyroscope,
I think of that spinning top toy, the little
metal wheel. That's a mechanical gyro, right?
These were completely different. They worked
using something called the Coriolis effect. Okay.
Essentially, they vibrated a tiny silicon structure.
And when I say tiny, I mean microscopic, like
a tiny tuning fork. When the Segway tilted or
rotated, the Coriolis force would cause that
vibrating structure to shift just a little bit.
And the machine could measure that shift. With
incredible precision. electronics could measure
that deflection and know exactly how fast and
in what direction the machine was tilting. So
no moving parts, really. No macroscopic moving
parts, which made them incredibly durable and
reliable. And get this, the Segway had five of
these gyroscopes. Five? Why on earth did it need
five? Well, that's the thing. It didn't. It only
needed three to balance properly, one for each
axis of movement. So what were the other two
for? Backups. This is that aerospace influence
again. It's called redundancy. Ah, of course.
If one of the primary sensors failed for any
reason, the machine wouldn't just shut off and
throw you into traffic. It would seamlessly switch
to the backup sensor without you even noticing.
That makes a lot of sense. I mean, if my laptop
crashes, I just lose a Word document if the Segway
crashes. You break your nose or worse. Exactly.
The consequence of failure was physical injury.
So they built like a fighter jet. They over -engineered
it for safety. So you have these gyroscopes and
tilt sensors, and they're detecting the tiniest
shift in the rider's weight. And that data is
fed into the computer, which then tells the motors
what to do. And that created the user experience.
The telepathic feeling. Exactly. The source describes
it as the user simply leaning forward to go and
leaning back to stop or reverse. Because the
sampling rate was so high, I mean, it was checking
its own balance 100 times every second. The reaction
was... Instantaneous. A hundred times a second.
So it felt, as so many early users described,
telepathic. You think, go forward. You lean a
millimeter and you just go. It really was marriagey
at the time. I remember riding one years and
years ago. And it does feel like the machine
is reading your mind. You don't feel like you're
pushing a throttle or steering a vehicle. You
just float. And that was the genius of Dean Kamen's
vision. He said he didn't want a vehicle you
drove. He wanted a vehicle you wore. Something
that became an extension of your body. So what
was powering this thing? Let's look at the power
source. Initially, they were using nickel metal
hydride batteries, right? Not lithium ion. Correct.
The early models used NMRH batteries. Later,
they would switch to lithium ion, which was a
huge, huge upgrade in both range and weight.
But in those first generation models, you were
looking at a range of about 6 to 10 miles on
a single charge. Which for 2001 is actually decent,
but it's not exactly, you know, a cross -country
tour. No, absolutely not. And a full recharge
took four to six hours. So it was strictly an
urban mobility device, a last mile solution,
as they called it. Now, I want to talk about
how you actually steered the thing in the beginning.
Because if you've ridden a Segway recently or
you've seen one in a mall, you know you lean
the handlebars left and right to turn. Right.
That's the intuitive way. But that's not how
the original worked at all. No. And this is a
detail that's often forgotten. The first generation,
the Segway HT, it didn't rely on leaning the
handlebars for turning. It used a twist grip.
on the left handle. Like a throttle on a motorcycle?
Sort of, but it wasn't for speed. It was for
turning. You would twist it to vary the speeds
of the two motors independently. Ah, so it was
differential steering. Exactly. If you twisted
the grip forward, one wheel would spin a little
faster than the other, causing the whole unit
to pivot. It was much more mechanical, much less
intuitive than the lean -to -turn system that
came later. It sounds kind of tricky. It was
a bit tricky to master, especially while you
were also trying to learn how to balance with
your body. It was two different mental tasks
at once. And they had different keys for the
speed settings, right? I remember this being
a big deal. You had to have the right key to
go fast. That's right. There are these little
physical electronic fobs, almost like a car key.
The source lists three specific settings for
the original models. Okay, what were they? You
had the black key, which was the learning or
slow setting. It capped you at a very safe six
miles per hour. The beginner mode. Exactly. Then
you had the yellow key, which lets you go up
to eight miles per hour with faster turning.
And then you had the red key. The red key. The
danger zone. The key to unlocking its full blistering
top speed of... 10 miles per hour. 10 miles an
hour. It sounds so slow now, but standing eight
inches off the ground on a narrow platform, I
bet 10 miles an hour feels pretty quick. Oh,
it does. It feels plenty fast. Yeah. About three
or four times faster than an average walking
speed. And that was the whole pitch. Walk, but
faster and without sweating. But the launch wasn't
without its problems. We have to talk about the
recall. That must have been a huge blow. Yes,
September 2003. This was a significant blow to
the early momentum for sure. The source notes
a recall was issued because of a very specific
danger related to the battery. Okay, what was
the issue? Did they catch fire? No, nothing like
that. It was about what happened when the battery
got critically low. If users ignored the repeated
low battery warnings. Which people do all the
time. All the time. If you ignored the warnings,
the machine could suddenly execute an emergency
shutdown. And on a self -balancing machine, shutdown
means stop balancing. Which means the rider face
plants instantly. If you are moving at 10 miles
an hour and the machine suddenly just gives up
and goes limp. Momentum takes over. You become
a projectile. Exactly. It was a serious safety
flaw. So they had to fix that, obviously. They
did. They issued a software update. They added
a feature called speed limiter or pushback. If
the battery was getting low, or if you were trying
to accelerate too fast or go too steep a hill,
the machine would actively tilt the handlebars
back towards you. Oh, so it forces your weight
back? It forces you to slow down. It feels like
the machine is fighting you, like a horse rearing
up. That's a terrifying sensation, actually,
the robot saying no. It is, but it's a lot better
than the power just cutting out completely and
sending you flying. Fair point. So that was the
first generation. That ran from 2001 to about
2006. But then came the big upgrade, the lean
steer era. This is when the Segway really became
the machine that most of us recognize today.
2006 was a pivotal year for them. Segway Inc.
actually discontinued all the previous models.
They just wiped the slate clean and introduced
two new ones. The I2 and the Bi2. The I2 and
the Bi2. Very Apple -sounding names for the time.
Very much so. Yeah. And the single biggest change
was the introduction of lean steer. So gone was
the twist grip. Gone. Completely gone. Now, the
entire handlebar stock pivoted left and right
from the base. So if you wanted to turn left,
you just leaned your body in the bar to the left.
Which is how your body wants to turn anyway.
It's completely natural. It aligned the steering
mechanism with the balancing mechanism. It made
the whole experience totally cohesive. You lean
forward to go, lean back to stop, lean left or
right to turn. One simple intuitive system. It
completed that telepathic feel they were going
for. And they bumped up the specs too. Significantly.
The top speed went up to 12 .5 miles per hour.
A nice little boost. But more importantly, the
range. Right. They switched to lithium ion batteries.
They did. And with the better batteries and the
addition of regenerative braking, so it would
capture energy when you slowed down, the range
jumped to 15 to 25 miles. That is a huge jump.
25 miles is a legitimate commute for some people.
You could go from the suburbs to downtown and
maybe even back. It is. It moved it from a last
mile device to a last few miles device. Yeah.
It really opened up its potential utility. And
they also introduced the InfoKey. The info key.
This was like a little digital dashboard, right?
But wireless. Yeah, a wireless controller that
you could keep in your pocket or clip to the
handlebar. It showed your speed, your trip odometer,
your battery life. But it also acted as the security
key. And it had that security mode. Which was
actually quite clever. If you parked your Segway
somewhere and put it in security mode, it would
lock the wheels. But if someone tried to move
it, not only would a loud alarm go off, but the
wheels would actively resist the movement. The
motors would engage and shudder and fight against
being rolled away. A rebellious little robot.
I love that. It was a very advanced piece of
kit for 2006. Now, before we move on to the business
side of things, the... Expert in you will love
this part. The source material lists a whole
bunch of different model variants from that pre
-2011 era. We know the i2 and the bi -2, but
there were some deep cuts. Oh, for sure. There
were a lot of distinct figures of Segway. Before
the i2, you had the original i167, and then there
was the E167. The E167, what was special about
that? It had an electric kickstand. An electric
kickstand. That feels like peak luxury or peak
over -engineering. A little of both, maybe. Then
there was the P133, which was a much smaller
platform with smaller wheels. It was less powerful,
maxing out at 10 miles per hour. And it was designed
perhaps for lighter users or for use in tighter
indoor spaces like a warehouse. And the XT, what
was that? The XT was the precursor to the X2.
It was really the first Segway specifically designed
for recreation. It had those big, knobby, rugged
tires for off -road use. And we can't forget
the golf aspect. They really tried to make that
happen. Oh, we cannot. The buy two SE Sport had
accessories. There's a whole third -party company
called Seg Solution. And it was all aimed at
the golf market. The idea was to replace the
big four -person golf cart with a personal stand
-up carrier for your clubs. I mean, it makes
sense on paper. It probably speeds up the game,
less damage to the turf. But again, we didn't
see a mass takeover of the world's golf courses.
No. No, we did not. And that brings us right
to the business reality. Because despite all
this amazing innovation, despite the aerospace
sensors and the telepathic steering, the company
was really struggling to find its footing. It
just wasn't selling. It wasn't selling in the
numbers they needed. And this leads us to the
end of the Dean -Kamen era. Right. So this is
Section 3, the business roller coaster. Dean
Kamen, the inventor, the man behind the entire
vision, he sells the company in December 2009.
He sells it to a British businessman, a millionaire
named Jimmy Heselden. And this, this is where
the story takes a turn that plays out like a
Greek tragedy. And I really don't use that term
lately here. It is genuinely tragic. And the
irony is just. Yeah. It's almost unbelievable.
So Jimmy Heselden buys the company in December
2009. He was a self -made man, a philanthropist,
a former coal miner. He clearly believed in the
product and its potential. Okay. But less than
a year later, in September of 2010, disaster
struck. What happened? Heselden was riding a
Segway. The reports say it was a rugged country
version, so likely in a buy -two model with the
off -road tires on, his private estate in Yorkshire,
England. Okay. He was riding near a cliff path
that was above the River Wharf. And he went over
the edge. He plunged 80 feet into the river below.
He was found dead. The owner of the Segway company
died while riding a Segway. It's hard to overstate
how much of a shadow this single event cast over
the brand. I remember reading about it when it
happened, and it just felt like, well, it felt
like proof to all the skeptics. It reinforced
every single negative public perception of the
device. It was already seen as expensive and,
you know, maybe a little bit dorky. Now it was
perceived as potentially dangerous. The logic
is brutal. If the owner of the company, a man
who presumably knew the machine better than anyone
on the planet, could have a fatal accident on
one. What chance did the average consumer have?
It was a PR nightmare that they could never really
recover from. Just an awful, awful story. So
the company is in turmoil. The new owner is gone.
And a few years later, a new player enters the
scene, this time a rival. Enter Ninebot. Ninebot
was a robotic startup based in Beijing. And they
weren't exactly friends at first. This wasn't
a friendly merger we're talking about initially.
Oh, far from it. This was a hostile relationship.
Ninebot was making similar self -balancing scooters,
what many would call knockoffs. And Segway Inc.
was not happy about it at all. The source mentions
a pretty serious legal battle. In 2014, Segway
Inc. filed official complaints with the U .S.
International Trade Commission. Their claim was
very straightforward. Patent infringement. Exactly.
They claimed that Ninebot and several other companies
were infringing on Segway's patents and copyrights.
So Segway wanted to block them from the U .S.
market. They wanted to ban the imports of all
these competing scooters into the United States.
They were trying to use their intellectual property
as a shield to protect... what little market
they had. We invented this. You can't sell your
version here. But Ninebot, they had some serious
backing. Oh, serious backing. They had just raised
$80 million from Xiaomi, one of the biggest tech
companies in China, and from Sequoia Capital,
a legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
So you have Segway, the fading American pioneer,
trying to sue Ninebot, the well -funded Chinese
upstart. And how did that resolve itself? In
the classic ultimate corporate power maneuver.
If you can't win the lawsuit, just buy the plaintiff.
Wow. In April of 2015, Ninebot announced that
it had acquired Segway Inc. They just bought
them out. Completely. The lawsuit just vanished
because the two companies became one. And this
shifted the entire trajectory of the company.
It broadened the scope from just making the Segway
PT to a whole range of other personal transportation
devices. But for the Segway PT, the classic original
two -wheeler, the writing was on the wall. It
took another five years, but yes. In June of
2020, the announcement finally came down. Ninebot
announced it would no longer make the Segway
PT. Production was ending. The end of an era.
And looking back at the sales stats now, they
are just, they're sobering. The number is 140
,000 units. That is the total sales figure over
the entire lifetime of the product. Over almost
20 years. From 2001 to 2020, 140 ,000. I mean,
to put that in perspective, Apple sells that
many iPhones in like an hour a morning. It's
probably less than an hour, yeah. Even for a
vehicle, that's a tiny, tiny number. And the
source notes that in its later years, the Segway
PT line made up only 1 .5 % of a company's total
profit. One and a half percent. It had become
a legacy product, a footnote in its own company.
So we have to ask the big question, why? Why
did it fail? Why wasn't it bigger than the internet?
Why didn't it redesign all our cities? The source
material and... You know, just looking back,
it points to several key factors that all kind
of converged. First and foremost, the price.
Oh, the price. It launched at $5 ,000 U .S. dollars.
$5 ,000. In 2001, money. That's roughly, what,
$7 ,500 or $8 ,000 today? That was just an astronomical
sum for a device that couldn't protect you from
the rain, couldn't carry a passenger, and you
couldn't legally ride on the street or the sidewalk
in most places. It was legislative chaos. And,
you know, Steve Jobs was right about that. The
source mentions that Jobs, after his initial
hype, later criticized it heavily. He asked Kamen,
you're sure your market is upscale consumers
for transportation? He saw the flaw in that pricing
strategy immediately. He knew. It was priced
like a decent used car, but it had the utility
of a very expensive bicycle. It just didn't make
economic sense for the average person. Not at
all. You could buy a really nice Vespa scooter
and still have thousands of dollars left over.
Okay, so price is number one. What's next? The
learning curve. Right. It wasn't as plug and
play as promised. No. You had to learn to trust
it. You had to learn to balance in a new way.
And when that trust was broken, it was very,
very public. We mentioned the tragedy with Jimmy
Heselden, but there were all those other high
-profile accidents that really hurt the image.
The source lists some huge names. George W. Bush.
I remember that photo. It was everywhere. The
president of the United States falling off a
Segway at his parents' home. Yep. He apparently
tried to get on it while it was turned off or
something like that, and down he went. Yeah.
Then you have Usain Bolt. The fastest man in
the world. Gets run over by a cameraman on a
Segway. Oh, that's right. He wasn't even riding
it. He was the victim of one. Exactly. It was
at the World Athletics Championships. The cameraman
on the Segway hit a trackside rail, lost control,
and just bowled right into the fastest runner
on the planet right after he won a race. It's
like a comedy sketch. It really is. And it reinforced
this idea that these things were clumsy or hard
to control or just generally dangerous. Ellen
DeGeneres had a mishap on her show. Ian Healy,
the Australian cricketer. Each of these little
incidents just chipped away at that aura of high
-tech perfection. And finally, there's the competition.
The thing that actually did solve the last mile
problem. The electric kick scooter. The simple
solution. It turns out you don't need a complex
$5 ,000 self -balancing robot with five gyroscopes
to go a mile down the road. You just need a board,
two wheels, a handle, and a battery. It's so
much cheaper, it's easier to understand, and
if the battery dies on a kick scooter? You just
kick. It doesn't throw you on your face. It's
the triumph of simplicity and good enough. So
the Segway PT didn't disappear entirely from
public life. It just found a very specific niche.
A very specific and very small niche. Basically,
tourism and security. Segway Tours. A staple
of tourist -heavy cities like Florence or Paris
or Washington, D .C. And it makes perfect sense
in that context. You can cover way more ground
than walking, you don't get tired, and the tour
group stays together. And the high price point
is absorbed by the rental fee. You're not buying
it, you're just renting it for an hour. Exactly.
And the other niche was police and private security.
Right. The source notes that the 2008 Summer
Olympics in Beijing used special police forces
on segways to patrol the grounds. And the Stockholm
police adopted the I -2 model in 2018 for patrolling
the narrow cobblestone streets of the old town.
So why police? Is it just so they don't have
to walk as much? It's partly about reducing fatigue
over a long shift, for sure. But the bigger advantage
is height. When you're standing on a Segway,
you're about eight inches taller than everyone
else. Ah, that makes sense. A commanding view.
You have a commanding view of the crowd, and
just as importantly, the crowd can see you. It
provides a certain kind of authority and presence
that walking... Or even riding a bicycle doesn't.
And they even marketed them to emergency medical
services. Yeah, in 2011. The idea was for first
responders to get through dense crowds at a concert
or a marathon quickly. So it found a home where
standing higher and moving efficiently without
getting tired were worth that $5 ,000 price tag.
But that was never going to be the mass market
revolution they had promised. Not even close.
So the PT is gone. But as we said at the start,
the Segway brand is very much alive and kicking.
This brings us to Section 5, Segway Lives On.
This is all the Ninebot influence. They successfully
pivoted the brand from being about a single revolutionary
product to being a broad mobility manufacturer.
Let's look at the modern product lineup, because
it is wildly different from Dean Common's original
vision. It is unrecognizable. First, you have
the consumer scooters that are sort of related
to the original, the Ninebots by Segway E+. And
the Mini PRO. The Mini PRO is interesting. That's
the one without the handlebar, right? Right.
It's a smaller, self -balancing scooter. But
instead of a big handlebar, it just has a knee
control bar in the middle. I've seen those. You
kind of steer it with your knees. Exactly. You
lean into it with your knees to turn. It's the
spiritual successor to the PT, but it's much
smaller, much lighter, and drastically cheaper.
And then there are the kick scooters, the ones
we see on every street corner in every major
city. Yep. The GT1, the GT2, they call these
super scooters. They're high speed, high performance.
And the ZT3 Pro. This is where the sales volume
is now. This is what people actually buy to commute.
And they also kept the robotics dream alive just
a little bit. Just a tiny bit. There's the Segway
robot, which is basically a mini PRO with a head
and arms. And Lumo, which is this little robot
companion that you can also ride. Bit of a novelty.
But here is the pivot that really surprised me
when I was looking at the source material. Power
Sports. Segway is now making farm equipment.
Basically. In February 2022, they officially
entered the UTV market utility terrain vehicles.
So we are talking about those four wheeled buggies
you see on farms or on trails like a Polaris
or a Can -Am. The exact same market. They have
ATVs, all terrain vehicles like the AT5 and AT6.
They have SSVs, which are side by sides. And
check out the names they're using. Right. You
mentioned this. They have a model called the
Supervillain. The Supervillain. That is a long,
long way from the friendly human transporter.
The SX20 Supervillain Hybrid. It's a high -performance,
aggressive off -road machine. And dirt bikes.
And electric dirt bikes. The dirt e -bike X160
and X260. And full -on electric motorcycles like
the Zyber and the E300 SE. This was so fascinating.
They went from... We are going to save the environment
and redesign cities with this gentle, silent,
balancing transport, too. Let's tear up some
dirt trails on a machine called the supervillain.
It's a complete and total reinvention. They took
the valuable parts, the battery tech, the motor
tech, and the brand recognition, and they applied
it to markets that actually existed and were
willing to pay for performance. So they stopped
trying to create a new human behavior balancing
on a sidewalk and started serving existing behaviors
like riding dirt bikes. and commuting on kick
scooters. A much smarter business strategy, it
turns out. So let's bring this all home. The
outro. We've gone on this journey from the secret
code name Ginger, the bigger than the Internet
hype, to the big reveal in Bryant Park. We've
seen the incredible engineering of the inverted
pendulum, those aerospace grade BAE systems,
gyroscopes. We saw the truly tragic death of
Jimmy Heselden, which cast such a dark cloud.
And finally, the acquisition by Ninebot and the
pivot to kick scooters and ATVs. You know, it's
a journey that really validates. what steve jobs
said later on he initially bought the hype but
then he famously said he thought it sucked right
he criticized the design but crucially he criticized
that upscale price point and he turned out to
be 100 right the technology was amazing but the
product market fit just wasn't there at five
thousand dollars but and this is the key takeaway
for me the segway pt might be gone but its dna
is absolutely everywhere absolutely the segway
pt paved the way The battery technology, the
efficiency of the electric motors, the very idea
of personal electric mobility in a city Segway
started that entire conversation. The electric
scooter boom that we see in cities today, you
know, the birds and the limes and all the privately
owned scooters. That exists in the wake of the
Segway. It does. It normalized the idea. The
brand Segway is now, ironically, more associated
with the electric kick scooters you see on every
corner than the two -wheeled chariot that Dean
Kamen originally invented. And in a way, you
could argue that's a kind of victory. The mission
of changing urban transport ultimately succeeded,
even if the original vehicle failed to do it.
Which brings us to our final thought for you,
the listener. The Segway was supposed to solve
the last mile problem. It failed. But 20 years
later, electric kick scooters solved it using
much, much simpler technology. So here's the
question we want to leave you with. Is it better
to be the pioneer who invents the complex, perfect,
over -engineered machine, the Segway PT? Or is
it better to be the one who comes along later
and simplifies it for the masses? the kick studer.
Because sometimes revolutionary is just code
for too early or maybe just too complicated.
Sometimes the simple broomstick is better than
the balancing robot. That's all for this deep
dive. Thanks for listening. Stay curious.