Segway, which boldly claimed its two-wheeled personal transporter would revolutionize the way people get around, is ending production of its namesake vehicle.The funniest thing, of course, was all the build up to its disclosure as a "revolutionary" device that will change our cities. And then the vastly underwhelmed TV host with her (justifiably) dismissive "is that all?". Is that clip on Youtube?
The Segway PT, popular with tourists and police officers but perhaps better known for its high-profile crashes, will be retired on 15 July, the company said in a statement.
As for what is effectively its successor - the electric scooter - I still haven't tried one, but it keeps occurring to me that in my not-so-radical-but-why-does-no-one-else-think-of-this plans to reduce carbon emissions, the government could probably do a lot worse than give every student who graduates from high school an $800 electric scooter as a personal transport device to tide them over until they can afford to buy an electric car. Segway makes a good one, but so does Xiaomi, and it is important to please our coming Chinese overlords, so I would go for one of those.
(I still think three wheel electric scooters would be safer, but seems that few are made.)
1 comment:
Electric bikes and scooters are a great way to deal with medium term energy deprivation which looks to plague us clear through the end of the century. Especially electric bikes combined with high-rise small towns. If all the parking and the cars go up in the air, and tend to be used mainly for inter-town travel, then we have more room as less energy consumption. We have less infrastructure needs and more space.
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