A comparison: Segway HT vs. car vs. airplane

[SegwayUtah]

When I tell people the range and speed of my Segway, they sometimes mention something like "well, I couldn't make it to Salt Lake City" (central SLC is 40 miles north of here).

I usually respond with "you're exactly right. The Segway is not meant for long-distance transportation, although it works well to get you to the bus stop, onto the bus, and to your destination. I've even gone all the way to Chicago (> 1,000 miles) with a Segway and a train."

Then, I follow up with "just like you wouldn't take an airplane to go 30 or 40 miles, it doesn't really make sense to get in a car to go a mile or two. By yourself. Carrying no more than you can hold anyway. Yet most americans will get in a car if they have to go more than just a quarter mile. We've never had a fun, reliable, environmentally responsible way to get around on those 2-4 mile trips until the Segway HT came along. It's actually so fun that I take it on 7 mile trips as well sometimes; and it can be very relaxing."

Also, there seem to have been a lot of silly comparisons recently between full-size Segway-lookalike toy transportation (stand-up scooters) and Segway HTs (self-balancing robot transportation) themselves. So I'd like to make another silly comparison:

Helicopters are obviously the perfect form of transportation. While a Segway HT i167 can only go 12.5 mph legally, and a car (Corolla, Ferrari, whatever) can only go maybe 75 mph legally, a Westland Lynx helicopter can make it from just about anywhere at a blazingly fast 240 mph. Just imagine how fast you could get to the neighborhood grocery store. And you can go anywhere--you just need 4 parking spaces, but everyone will understand your need for speed.

Personal choice is a wonderful thing. To understand a Segway one often needs to use a Segway. Then its purpose becomes self-evident.

Chris

[defenbaugh]

Chris-I like your logic. Now, why can't we get people to try the Segway? My wife, employees, friends, and relatives think I am eccentric for using my HTi. Most won't try it and if they do, they seem to be doing it only to appease my insistence. Use your logical mind on that one.:D

Ron
"Literacy requires reading, change requires effort and enlightenment requires courage."

[Sal]

I think that these Q and Segway comparisons are just something at the forefront for media to write about, so they can get ratings/readership. I think that anyone with common sense knows that the 2 are more different than alike. Although the CEO of Q didn't fully admit it, he did a pretty good job of giving Segway it's due.

The Q and the Segway are almost nothing alike, except for their intended purpose. Put them to the test, and it's no contest.

The FDA won't allow any drug company to compare their products with those of another with the same indication without head to head clinical trials, even if the 2 medications are in the same drug class.

I think BruceWright is probably the only one of us who has the unequivocal authority at the moment to formulate opinions about the Q and the Segway and compare and contrast the 2, because he performed a "clinical trial" of both machines. And the Segway won handily.

I don't think TechTV aired anything of the sort on their edited clip. And I doubt that the Segway will get a fair shake from the media with regards to the Q, just because the price point is far too disparate.

They are NOT the same. Compare the Q to a motorized seated scooter, that seniors use, there are plenty more similarities between those two devices than the Segway.

It looks like a Seg from the front... so what?

It may look like a duck, does NOT quack like a duck, and certainly does not smell like a duck... It ain't no duck.

Let us Segway owners not be defensive about the Q. We have a machine that just cannot be compared. It's a different animal completely. Let's be proactive about the strengths of the Segway, and let the Q people be defensive.

I'm not trying to start a Q vs. Seg war, but too often the apparent underdog (from the media's perspective) in order to sway the public doesn't take a stand... I think we have a hands down winner with the Segway, we know it... Let's show the public what we're made of.

Besides, time will tell. When people buy the Q, and see what they CAN'T do with it.


-Sal

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[BenBethel]

To get people on the Segway, I say stuff like "I've had a blind man, people bound to wheelchairs, and 95 year old women try it" - which is all true - then they hop on it and love it!

Ben

www.benbethel.com

[SegwayUtah]

Sal,

You are exactly right. I was trying to show the sillyness in the defensive--"but, but my Segway _is_ better than your scooter." :)

You are right. The Segway is a whole different animal. I'm glad that a real Segway owner was on the TechTV piece as opposed to someone hired by Rad2Go to make the HT look bad.

Chris

[Florida Ever-Glides]

Q-Tip of the day: Rad2Go make and sells scooters, nothing more, nothing less...

Tom Jacobson

[ZoliHonig]

Never thought of it that way.

Good comparison Chris



[8]-Zoli[8]

[albaby]

quote:Then, I follow up with "just like you wouldn't take an airplane to go 30 or 40 miles, it doesn't really make sense to get in a car to go a mile or two. By yourself. Carrying no more than you can hold anyway."
This is, I think, one of the the central assumptions behind the Segway as a consumer product. But is it true?

Why doesn't it make sense to get in a car to go one or two miles, if you have a car? I'm not suggesting that there are no reasons why you wouldn't - short trips cause wear and tear, it's slightly more environmentally damaging, parking costs. Rather, I'm just asking whether there's any reason to postulate it as an absurdity. A car is perfectly capable of transporting a person for one or two miles.

One of the advantages of a car is its flexibility. It's capable of long trips, intermediate trips, and short trips. A single device capable of fulfilling a variety of functions. The photocopy machine at my office costs thousands of dollars and can perform massive duplicating feats - but sometimes I'll use it to photocopy a single business card. No one suggests that we should buy a second, smaller photocopy machine to put next to the large one for those copy jobs that are a single copy. Heck, sometimes I use an incredibly powerful computer to do nothing more than run a calculator.

There's nothing wrong with using a single machine to perform multiple functions, even though for the smallest functions it's way more machine than you need. The small inefficiency of using too much machine for the small tasks is less than the larger inefficiency of having two separate machines for a range of tasks that could be handled by one.

In many instances, of course, the balance tips towards having multiple machines - and that's part of what Segway is counting on. But it's hardly so self-evident as to be comparable to using an airplane for short trips.

Albaby

[SegwayUtah]

Albaby,

You bring up a good point. We don't see the inefficiencies of driving around cars for short trips because we're used to it and our world has been architected around it.

Shopping centers around here have oceans of parking because their customers drive to the mall. If they didn't have so much parking (which costs them a fortune, and they'd rather not have), people would think more about taking a personal transporter to the mall.

Heck, they wouldn't even need parking for all the transporters. Some people would choose to wear them inside while others would choose to take them off inside the entry hallway, etc.

It makes perfect sense to take a helicopter for 2 miles if there were parking spots available helicopters at the mall as well. And some of those can go up to 240mph, so they work really well long-range as well. If enough people used helicopters for their short-distance transportation, I'm sure the helicopter industry would figure out a way to make a smaller helicopter as well.

Anyway, the reason why we all drive around in this country is because of habits and culture and infrastructure. It's really hard on our cars and the environment to drive around on all these short trips, it makes our culture more anti-social and probably more violent, etc. etc. In other countries, cars aren't so much a part of the culture, and people get things done very easily without them.

The other half of this equation: cars are so inefficient space-wise that there comes a point where traffic is so bad that using a personal transporter for those short trips is actually faster. I have friends in Boston/New York/etc. who don't even own a car, and they love not having one.

Chris

[SegwayUtah]

P.S.

I don't think that driving a car for 1-2 miles is necessarily absurd. There are some places where the only roads from point a to point b are 55mph roads with no shoulders or sidewalks. People are scared to do anything but drive between the points, and they typically don't want to walk.

Outside of that, if people want to drive cars, it's a personal choice. It is one that ultimately affects all our neighbors when taken as a total effect. As the pathway architecture for personal transporters evolves (i.e. there should one day be lanes for fast-moving sidewalk traffic--runners, joggers, and those using personal transporters who wish to join them), personal transportation becomes more self-evident.

I like Toyota's "personal vehicle" concept as well. If they can make it safe, cost-effective, and environmentally-friendly, they'll have something good going there too.

One last thought . . . we're so used to using our cars for every trip in America that trips that are 2 miles and trips that are 6 miles are not too much different to us. So major destinations, instead of being neighborhood-oriented, become centrally located. This further drives the demand for cars and, some would say, takes the "neighbor" our of "neighborhood."

As more people use personal tranpsorters, you will probably see more neighborhood businesses popping up as well.

Chris

[Sal]

How about extrapolating the 1-2 mile car trips to the environmental impact/social impact if the majority of car owners stopped using their cars for the short trips of that sort. I think it would be a major positive.

Albaby makes a valid point:

"There's nothing wrong with using a single machine to perform multiple functions, even though for the smallest functions it's way more machine than you need."

I believe that as has been stated, this is a social acceptance, as in other cultures if you told them that you took your car to work every morning even though work was about 2 miles away, they would find that absolutely absurd. It's normal in the US to use the car for anything and everything, no matter the distance, purpose. The car is a part of our culture.

We as segway owners are setting the foundations for a massice cultural change.

Take computer software. Adobe makes Photoshop. A massive feat of coding. Most of us use only about 1-2% of what the program is actually capable of. So what does Adobe do to entice the casual user? Comes up with "consumer" level versions of it's top selling brands... less features, but cheaper because of it.

And people buy it, because, they realize that with Photoshop (full) they are getting too much machine for what they need.

Shifting gears for every day folk to think of their cars in this manner will require much more work, and time.

But realize that Segways aren't done evolving, there will be advancements made to the Line to make them more flexible.

We have the Model T's of the future. Let's make history.

With more use, and more acceptance, the infrastructure will be FORCED to change around the Segway, just as it did for the car. And how Airspace has been mapped out, and divided for airplanes.

There will come a time when segways, cars, bicycles, will all have their place and live happily side by side.

I think that it requires an open mind.

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[mrleisure]

quote:Originally posted by SegwayUtah


I don't think that driving a car for 1-2 miles is necessarily absurd.


Most would agree with you on this. Our current culture revolves around the idea that squandering natural resources is acceptable behavior, and will go on indefinitely. This *is* the current reality.

But what happens when price of oil spikes due to either Hubberts Peak, another contrived gas crisis (like the 1970's), a true middle-east meltdown or some other random event? Overnight, the idea of driving 3 miles for a box of Scooby-snacks will be forgotten.

Gasoline at current prices is an outrageous bargain. It's cheaper by a factor of at least two than the bottled water they sell inside the gas station. And that water doesn't travel halfway around the world in a tanker, get heavily refined and taxed. It can't last.

When gasoline prices do spike (it will happen) maybe folks will wake up to the reality that the Segway was years ahead of it's time. Alternative transportation is where it's at, gasoline powered automobiles are so yesterday it's absurd.

Americans will need to be pulled, kicking and screaming, from the mass hallucination that cheap gasoline is an entitlement. Enjoy being the guy who was way ahead of his time in owning a Segway *before* the roof fell in.

[albaby]

Those are all excellent points, and it will be interesting to see how the issue plays out.

When I think about this particular aspect of the Segway, I like to think of it in terms of toaster ovens and clothes dryers.

The oven and the clothes dryer are two fairly ubiquitous appliances. Nearly every home has an oven, and many single family homes will have a clothes dryer. Both are fairly large appliances, and can cook/dry a pretty wide range of different-sized items/loads.

Now, an oven is very big, and wastes a lot of energy, in cooking a very small amount of food. So there's a pretty popular consumer product - the toaster oven - that provides a more efficient way of cooking small quantities. That's a very common household item.

A dryer is also very big, and wastes a lot of energy, in drying a small amount of clothes. However, there isn't a functional analog to the toaster oven for clothes dryers. Perhaps there are fewer instances where a consumer needs to dry a small amount, compared to cooking small amounts of food). Or perhaps it's simply not worth the expense of having a smaller subsidary clothes dryer compared to just running the big dryer with an undersized load.

So it's an open question whether an automobile is more like an oven or a clothes dryer. It may be that there simply isn't a need for a short-distance transportation device (or that there isn't enough of a need to warrant the infrastructure changes that posters expect).

It should be noted that there already are a wide range of short-distance transportation options. There are mopeds, gopeds, scooters, electric scooters, bicycles, electric bicycles, and these things:
http://www.southeastmobility.co.uk/mediac/400_0/media/Celebrity4WhlLegend3WhlModel.jpg
So while the Segway may be revolutionary in how it provides short-distance transportation, it merely becomes one more option for consumers.

For years...no, decades, consumers have had the ability to purchase a second vehicle that would more efficiently transport them on trips for 2-6 miles. Segway does it very differently than those other vehicles, but there doesn't seem to have been too much demand for a secondary vehicle exclusively for short-distance trips. The real question is whether Segway is so materially different that it addresses whatever shortcomings have prevented consumers from adopting a secondary vehicle the way they've adopted toaster ovens as a secondary oven.

Albaby

[SegwayUtah]

Albaby,

More good points. I think there are a few major differences for the HT which make it a _really_ big deal. Here are some big ones:

* Riding a Segway HT is super-cool. Last night, around 11pm, I had two really cute girls roll down their window to wave at me and cheer me on. Even though the picture you posted of two people on scooters (which, by the way was from a scooter store in the UK) showed the riders "smiling," you just don't feel "cool" riding around on a scooter like that. Maybe if a person was 8 years old . . .
* A Segway HT is person-sized; it can fit most anywhere a person can fit. Especially with the p-series, a Segway becomes an extension of its rider. It becomes a part of one's lifestyle as much as a transportation tool.
* A Segway HT acts like an electric pedestrian. You can actually take it most all of the places you could walk normally. It brings freedom of mobility back to its bearer in many cases, and for others it brings them a "magic carpet" of sorts.
* A Segway HT is a variable-terrain transporter. One of my friends who bought an HT didn't think my little p-series could make it up the big hill to his house. So he took his little electric scooter (which they used to just play around) to the bottom of the hill and I rode over on my HT. On the way down the hill, I was in complete control--and on the way I up, my machine acted like it was on smooth ground. Between the nasty sidewalk terrain and the hill, his little scooter didn't fare well :) Now, he rides all over the place, including miles to work, on his HT. He tells me all the time that it's very relaxing (enjoyable).

There are many more, but these are pretty big ones. Regardless, there are a lot of people pulling for the HT to succeed. If the volume can go up, and the price down over time, it should succeed.

The HT is extremely useful and insanely fun. It's also environmentally responsible and cool to wear in public. The price is the only barrier for people now, and that too will come down at least a little bit in time as volume increases.

And as for now, a person can get a new HT for just $75 or so a month.

Chris

[Ground Loop]

I like your outlook Chris. I can't say I've ever gotten a positive cheer.

In fact, the honest evaluation is that I still feel like a SuperDork on the HT, especially waiting at crosswalks. I've gotten a lot more mocking and general disdain than support from drivers; that's for sure. I don't know if it's the "conspicuous consumption" image that the HT has or just general animosity to the unusual, but if the HT had an Invisible Stealth Mode, I'd enable it.

Riding at night is the best. :)

[rethin]

Salkulkarni:
Good point, I was thinking a bit about what you said.
However to be completly analogous with your car/segway photoshop/Consumer
If I already have the full Photoshop whats the point in buying a stripped down version for quick tasks. In your analogy proberbly none. There has to be some thing compelling me to buy both the full and consumer versions.

Therefore
If I already have a car (full version of photoshop) what is compelling me to buy the consumer version (segway). Maybe there is, maybe there isn't some good reason to have both.

This is also pertinent to the photocopier and dryer machine comments. With both those products there is little incentive to buy a small lighter duty machine along with the full size machine.

The toaster oven/oven analogy is a bit different. With this one I really have an incentive to have both. But in my mind most of that is because I can buy a toaster oven for 40 bucks which really lowers the burden for me to buy it meaning the incetives can be smaller and I'd still have both machines.

Rethin

quote:Originally posted by salkulkarni
[Take computer software. Adobe makes Photoshop. A massive feat of coding. Most of us use only about 1-2% of what the program is actually capable of. So what does Adobe do to entice the casual user? Comes up with "consumer" level versions of it's top selling brands... less features, but cheaper because of it.

And people buy it, because, they realize that with Photoshop (full) they are getting too much machine for what they need.

[Sal]

People who don't own Photoshop would more consider the CS version than the full one... There are some Segway owners who have ditched their cars!

Think about how many trips with your cars (those that live in urban environments) have you taken within a 5 mile radius, compared with those in a wider path.

If the odds are in the shorter radius, project that out over a year, and think about how much money you'll save if you got a Segway?

I think that these arguments/debates will all be moot in a few years.

The Segway's utility is obvious, it just has to be realized. And in due time it will be.

-Sal

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[rethin]

Sal
Good point. Some people might just get the CS version. Some other people might just be satisfied with a toaster oven and skip the full size oven. But I'm not sure this covers all that many people. Even Dean says this is empowered walking, not a car replacement.

Since arguing by analogy is misleading, lets just turn this back to the Segway. The only way most people would have both a car and a seg would be because the advantage of having both is at least equal to the cost of buying both. I think there have been more than enough personal testimonies to this effect on this board in the last year or so that this is the case for at least the early adopters we see here.

<back to analogy>
More people have both a toaster oven and oven because the cost burden is so low. Perhaps the reason no one has a mini copier is because the price would be pretty near the full copier.

I hope for a future where the seg is more like a toaster oven than a copier, but even Dean has warned that the price proberbly won't drop signifigantly year to year(or something to that effect)

Rethin

[SegwayUtah]

Another thought . . .

Lots of people own full-size inkjet printers which are capable of printing out photos, and then own one of the small "photo printers" which are just barely big enough to print a photo.

It's simply more convenient, even though those little printers are soemtimes more expensive than the big ones.

Chris