Riiven Reverb
Segway PT
In 2001, an inventor unveiled a self-balancing scooter and predicted cities would redesign themselves around it. Cities passed laws against it instead.
The Moment
By the closing weeks of 2001, the dot-com crash had finished sorting which Bay Area offices still kept their lights on. Then a Manhattan inventor told the world he had a secret. For most of that year, technology reporters had chased a leaked book proposal that promised a device code-named Ginger would matter more than the internet. Steve Jobs was quoted saying cities would be designed around it. Jeff Bezos called it revolutionary. On the morning of December 3, the inventor wheeled the actual object onto Good Morning America and rode it in slow circles across the studio floor. It was a two-wheeled, self-balancing scooter that cost five thousand dollars. The room laughed before it clapped.
The Original
Dean Kamen had built his reputation on serious medical hardware: an insulin pump in the seventies, the HomeChoice peritoneal dialysis machine in the nineties, the iBot stair-climbing wheelchair in 1999. The personal transporter shared the iBot's core engineering. Five gyroscopes and a tilt-sensor cluster polled themselves a hundred times a second, predicting the rider's center of gravity and twitching the wheels beneath them to compensate. Lean forward, the platform moved forward. Lean back, it stopped. Patents filed by Kamen and his DEKA team through the late nineties described the balancing logic in flat, almost surgical language. The product itself, branded the Segway HT (for Human Transporter), shipped to consumers in March 2002 at $4,950. Police departments and corporate campuses ordered the first batches. Disney World rented them. The company projected sales of ten thousand units a week within months.
The Gap
· Why we believed itThe premise was not that the engineering would fail; it did not. The premise was that municipal infrastructure would meet the device halfway. Kamen had been quoted, before the launch, predicting that cities would rezone sidewalks, narrow car lanes, and rebuild parking around personal transporters. Cities did the opposite. Within two years, more than twenty U.S. states had passed laws restricting the Segway from sidewalks. San Francisco banned it outright. The European Union classified it as a motor vehicle requiring registration in most member states. Riders had nowhere legal to ride. The other half of the premise was the buyer. At nearly five thousand dollars, weighing thirty-eight kilograms, with no folding mechanism, the Segway asked an office commuter to choose it over a bicycle, a car, or simply walking. Roughly thirty thousand units sold in the first six years, against a forecast of ten thousand a week. The company was sold three times. Production of the original PT line ended in July 2020.
cities would rezone their sidewalks and streets around a $5,000 self-balancing scooter
Watch
Segway intro on Good Morning America Dec 3, 2001
A DokmanovichThe Echo → 2017
The premise was wrong in detail and right in shape. Cities did not redesign themselves around a five-thousand-dollar standing scooter, but within fifteen years they were redesigning themselves around dockless electric two-wheelers that cost a dollar to unlock. Bird, Lime, Spin, and a dozen regional operators inherited the same legal arguments Segway had lost, and won most of them in the second round. The self-balancing logic itself ran further than the product. It rode into hoverboards and one-wheel boards, into warehouse robots that pivot in place, into the bipedal demo videos that go viral every other quarter. Kamen's iBot wheelchair, which shared the gyroscope stack, was relaunched with updated FDA clearance in 2019. The patent family is cited in over a thousand later filings.
Why Now
The Segway is usually filed under products that overpromised. Read again, it was a product whose premise was off by one variable: cost. The same urban use case waited eighteen years for a cheaper vehicle and a smartphone to unlock it. When a founder says cities will rebuild around their product, the interesting question is not whether the claim sounds grandiose. The interesting question is whether the claim is grandiose in the right direction. Which of today's mocked premises is wrong only about price?
Sources
- Kamen et al., U.S. Patent 6,302,230 B1, "Personal Mobility Vehicles and Methods" (DEKA Products LP) (2001) · primary
- Segway LLC launch-era corporate site, archived by the Wayback Machine shortly after the Segway HT consumer announcement (2002) · primary
- Time Magazine cover, "Reinventing the Wheel" (December 10, 2001 issue) (2001) · primary
- Kemper, S. Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World (Harvard Business School Press) (2003) · retrospective
- Chokshi, N. "Segway, the Much-Hyped Scooter That Now Looks Quaint, Will Be Retired" (The New York Times) (2020) · retrospective