Segways Reach The End Of The Road But Bicycles Keep On Rolling

In December 2001, the “tech world’s most-speculated-about secret” was a transportation device. The inventor said the device—codenamed Ginger, and which cost $100 million to develop—was to be “to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.”

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’s Steve Jobs gushed: “If enough people see this machine, you won’t have to convince them to architect cities around it; it’ll just happen.”

Ginger’s inventor, a hugely rich, highly successful medical and robotics innovator, said: “I would stake my reputation, my money and my time on the fact that 10 years from now, this will be the way many people in many places get around.”

Dean Kamen’s reputation is intact and he still has oodles of money but all the time he spent on his pet project did not result in the creation of the Next Big Thing.

Kamen’s project was the Segway. The product has continued to sell since it first rolled off the production lines in 2002, but even in cities where tourists take tours on them, Segways have always existed in a liminal state: neat, clever but, ultimately, useless.

And now the latest owner—there have been four—has pulled the plug. No more Segways will be built, confirmed Chinese transportation company Ninebot.

Production of the Segway PT— a “lumbering self-balancing scooter” —will end on July 15 said Segway President Judy Cai in a statement. 21 employees will be laid off at the manufacturing plant in Bedford, New Hampshire, Fast Company reported. 

Cai wrote that the device had a “loyal following among private owners” who, she said, viewed the Segway as “one of the more innovative creations of the early 21st century.”

Innovative, but too slow to travel safely alongside motor traffic—no jurisdictions mandated their use on public roads—and yet too fast, and oftentimes unpredictable, on sidewalks.

There were also famous snafus, one of which was fatal.

A Segway-mounted cameraman knocked over Usain Bolt at a race in Beijing in 2015; TV personality Ellen DeGeneres fell while filming a segment of her show in 2010; and one-time brand owner Jim Heselden literally fell off a cliff while riding his personal Segway in 2009. The 62-year-old entrepreneur steered his machine over a 30ft cliff at his country estate at Thorp Arch, West Yorkshire.

The Segway PT was popular with exercise-averse police officers, but, at $6,000 for the latest machines, they were too rich for consumers.

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“Within its first decade, the Segway PT became a staple in security and law enforcement, viewed as an effective and efficient personal vehicle,” said Cai.

Effective? Consumers voted with their feet, staying well away from the Segway’s clever-but-doomed gyroscopic technology.

Silicon Valley tech bros got it badly wrong about “Ginger” but perhaps e-scooters—simpler to operate than a Segway—could become even more of a staple on city streets? That remains to be seen. For now, no cities are planning to “architect cities” around e-scooters.

Bicycles, on the other hand, are still with us after more than 200 years, and as we have seen with the bike boom and “pop-up” cycleways in cities such as Paris, London, Berlin and more, the future for the simple bicycle is rosier than ever.