Aside: if anyone's trying to talk someone they care about out of purchasing something like this, I suggest tricking them into getting a skateboard first. I think that would ground most people in reality. Fuck around enough at low speed in less-than-lethal environments, you'll get onto a first-name basis with Newtonian Physics, and it'll clarify, on a viscerally intuitive level, what these types of machines are really about.
The first thought that comes to my mind looking at this device is "these are failure-is-not-an-option situations". There's many ways to fall off a skateboard without dying, and to me it's viscerally obvious, absolutely none of them will ever apply here. You can't recover onto your feet, because these lithium-battery things are like 300% faster than your top sprinting speed. You can't fall onto your arms either, because your inertial speed is faster than your autonomous reflexes. (You learn all about your autonomous reflexes). It's just your face, and skull. This is the first thought that comes to mind: there's no way to bail, 0% chance. It's just completely not-an-option to fail on such a device at cruising speed. And I'm grounded enough to realize, I'm not a person who never fails physical feats. That's not what a human is.
I built my own electric longboard with enough power to throttle my hefty frame up to 25mph. It was perfectly tuned for me. I swapped out so many parts to get it just right. In the first hours of riding it, I took a fall that had me out of commission for a week. I was going 10mph!
Once I got the hang of things, I used the board to commute daily for a few months - putting ~ 8 miles on it daily. To this day, I consider daily rides on this board to be the single highest life threatening risk I have taken to date. I realize that now.
For anyone looking to use a board or one wheel or e-unicycle, please reconsider.
All it takes is one missed sign, one pothole, one inattentive driver, one loose bushing, one nail on the road, one patch of oil. You get the idea. The number and variety of risks and significance of the damage they could do should be enough to avoid.
With electric boards (not the one wheel) you need to constantly manage your center of gravity. This means if you want to break because of a hazard, you MUST shift your center of mass to lean in the direction of travel while slowing down. It takes some time to naturally manage throttle/brake in unison with your center of mass. After 3 months of daily rides, it still required intentional planning. Just let that sink in... All it takes is one "oh shit" moment where you miss the transfer of center of mass. You face plant and possibly slide directly under the path of the hazard you braked for.
If you still want to, get kevlar gear like motorcyclists use. Many have shoulder, elbow and back pad inserts. ALWAYS be padded and helmeted!
I rode an e-unicycle (EUC) for a few years as my main mode of transport. It was super fun, and after my first year I was really quite good at it, good enough to even dodge a few cars on instinct: my response was entirely unplanned, a reflex—a sharp turn, rather than an attempt to slow down, that I was shocked my body performed in retrospect. (Turns rely on center-of-mass and rubber friction, rather than motor acceleration or deceleration, which are limited.)
I loved riding that thing, it felt like flying. It was addictive. I rode it like wings, my instincts were so good it felt like I was one with it—it no longer required any intentional planning. Sure, I had my share of spills, but learned from each one where I'd messed up and how to become exceptionally careful, and was fortunate that I recovered from each in a few days.
I say all this because, like you, I now realize it was the single most life-threatening risk I've ever taken in my life. These things you write are 100% true:
> All it takes is one missed sign, one pothole, one inattentive driver, one loose bushing, one nail on the road, one patch of oil. You get the idea. The number and variety of risks and significance of the damage they could do should be enough to avoid.
> All it takes is one "oh shit" moment where you miss the transfer of center of mass. You face plant and possibly slide directly under the path of the hazard you braked for.
You are extremely exposed, and trusting your life to firmware developers.
99.99% of the time it is the unbelievable feeling of flying, slicing through the wind.
0.01% of the time it is slamming your body into rough pavement at 20mph, like diving face-first off a two-story building, no warning. No way to see it coming.
One day I decided to ride a cheap, narrow, narrow-wheeled skateboard down a fairly steep access road that led to a beach parking lot where I grew up.
At some point during the descent, the board started to shimmy violently, forcing me to jump off... but I was already going faster than I could run. But run I did, and my feet and legs literally fell behind my torso... upon which I fell and skidded down the asphalt, shirtless. I did manage to keep my chin up and off the pavement as I slid, however.
It was night-time and we were at the beach with some relatives. I gritted my way through playing in waves and showing my relatives around. Nobody noticed anything. When we got home and I walked into the light, my mom gawked at the shredded skin on my chest and, being a woman of considerable decorum, did NOT shout "WTF!!!" But that was definitely the nature of the response.
I’m sat here with a bunch of metal in my shoulder and a brain full of analgesia after coming off my mountain bike. I crashed at about a tenth of the speed I’d normally be going.
My helmet was trashed and definitely saved my life. I’m wondering whether extra padding would have saved me from weeks of pain, a surgery and months of immobilisation followed by months of rehab.
The thought of blasting down the road on a One wheel in T-shirt and jeans gives me chills now.
I mean bikes are soo much better than one-wheels and boards... the way you can "just" use tha brakes more or less freely on a bike without worrying about getting your CoG right before you do.. priceless.
But yes, of course people get hurt on bikes, too. But I believe you can be an order of magnitude safer at least.
Couldn’t say if that was a power loss issue or the wheel just got too deep in the mud, but doesn’t look fun especially if you imagine that fall on to concrete.
He’s probably going about 1/4 of this things top speed too.
I’ve had this same thing happen on a electric skateboard at about this speed but on asphalt. Shoulder dislocated, elbow broke, wrist sprain so severe I had to relearn how to use my hand. And I was a skateboarder my whole life leading up to that so I knew how to take a fall.
I still use electric bike and fat tire scooter/bike. But the high speed even on that feels sketchy. All it takes is a little gravel or something and you’ll lose your front wheel and eat it hard. That actually happened to a friend growing up, we were flying down a steep hill (ok maybe 20mph) on our BMX bikes. He hit gravel and the front wheel slid out. He had to have his upper lip stitched back on.
And you'll notice that he successfully plants his left foot, but momentum just carries him ahead and into the fall and roll. And this is a best case scenario.
"The deaths came as a result of head trauma, with at least three of the accidents happening with the rider in a helmet."
Where are you getting that quote? The article seems to contradict that:
"Alongside the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the company now seeks to remedy the products after four known death cases — three without a helmet — between 2019 and 2021."
I see someone riding one of these around my neighborhood in what is essentially full motorcycle gear:
- full helmet with closed visor
- armored jacket with elbow pads
- knee pads
- all high vis
Still doesn’t look like it’s enough while they cross a street in front of turning cars.
All various motorcycle helmet standards. ECE is the EU standard, DOT is the US Department of Transportation standard, FIM is another, stricter EU standard (Functional Independence Measure), and Snell is not an acronym but is an independent safety testing organization.
Also when I was buying my motorcycle gear (8 years ago) the general conses I recall is that ECE ~= DOT. Not sure what OP means regarding DOT certification.
- is nearly 50 years old without meaningful changes to reflect half a century of head injury and brain injury research
- has significantly lower standards for how much force can be transmitted through the helmet to your skull - well within values that commonly cause skull fracture
- does not have any brain injury criteria for rotational trauma
- does not have any independent random testing, and limited independent random test studies have found 50% of labeled helmets don't meet the standard
The last point is especially frightening! ECE has fixed all of these issues. Fortnine's videos on this (and the problems with Snell 2020R/2020D) are a great place to learn more.
He hopefully wasn't expecting to stop himself like that, that looks painful, it's asking for a sprain! But what a nice roll, does the fellow practice judo?
During my brief stint with longboarding, I found that tumbling (as taught in gymnastics, martial arts, parkour, etc) is quite useful for a high speed unplanned dismount. That would be applicable here too. However, my stint with longboarding was brief because less than 100% of crashes led to a successful tumble.
If you are riding with good posture and awareness it you can run out and roll from a one-wheel.
You might not be able fully "run it out" given the speed, but every step you take when bailing is a good thing and rolling out after you take a few steps will help as well.
At the end of the day, it's obviously going to be more dangerous than a bike or a scooter, though. My issues with future motion is more to do with their extremely poor response to design flaws, though.
I think that riding at more reasonable speeds and riding with focus and awareness is still reasonable, but the faults we've seen add hidden risks that are difficult to address as a rider.
That might be true unless your knee buckles or foot sticks blowing out your knee, acl, mcl, cartilidge which happened to me at 9mph. Luckily I only sprained the MCL for the 3rd time.
Wait what? I mean I agree about being able to fractionally run it out (I spilled at full speed when i first rode one of these and came out mostly fine because of a decade of skating) but there's no way that these are more dangerous than bikes or scooters. There are way more ways to get tangled/impaled (not usually literally, but more ways to have crash force concentrated in a smaller area) when crashing a bike/scooter.
Scooter I can kind of see the argument for. But bike not so much. Assuming we’re talking peddle bikes here, then they’re naturally self stabilising, and capable of far heavier breaking than a One Wheel is.
A One Wheel requires quite a lot of active balance from the user, a bike requires some balance, but hard cornering on a bike, or slamming the breaks on hard don’t generally result in unplanned dismounts, even with amateur bike riders. A One Wheel on the other hand, even experienced riders will still end up doing unplanned dismounts when performing rapid unexpected manoeuvres (such when avoiding another vehicle or pothole).
It’s only anecdata, but I’ve personally never had a serious unplanned dismount on a bike (after thousands of hours), and includes while mountain biking. I’ve have had a couple of nasty unplanned dismounts on a One Wheel just riding around a park. I suspect broader stats (assuming anyone’s even collected them) would probably find that my experiences of each mode of transport is pretty representative.
Been a long time and the link is lost but I saw a California DOT study that had Italian style scooters as dangerous as bicycles. It's at odds with what motorcyclists think. Also at odds the risk from motorcycles goes up sharply with displacement.
My personal experience was all dismounts from bicycles lead to bruises if that. And friends crashing at high speed tend to end up with hand and wrist injuries. Flip side I have three friends that needed knee surgery after stand up scooter accidents.
So I agree the typical dismount is really important.
That's a fair point, in terms of the odds of an incident being bad I would say scooters and bikes are more dangerous, but the odds of an incident happening at all on the onewheel is much more likely .
I think I would agree that you can probably have a much worse incident on bike vs a One Wheel. A bike allows you reach effectively unlimited speeds (provided you can find a big enough hill and tail wind), which brings with it uncapped risk.
But I think for most average bike riders, people who just ride a bike to get from A to B, rather than for sport (more speed always means more risk, at certain point I agree a bike becomes inherently more dangerous just due to the higher speeds). The odds of them having a bad incident on a bike is much lower than on a One Wheel. It’s quite hard to have an incident on a bike that results in a guaranteed head injury (please wear a helmet, it only takes a single bad head injury to ruin your life), whereas it’s quite hard to avoid a head injury from a One Wheel incident. Most bike related incidents (where someone isn’t just riding into a stationary object, in which case I don’t think the mode of transport matters much) result in the bikes wheel slipping out from under you, the consequence is moderately slowed, but quite painful fall sideways. The time it takes the bike to fall out from under you gives you a bit of time to prepare for the impact. All this assumes reasonable low speeds (not much faster than a run), due to non-sport based riding.
On a One Wheel or similar, dismounts tend to result in full bodied face plants. If you’re not able to come of the device, and catch yourself by running, then you tend to go face first to the pavement, and there’s nothing slowing you down. No bike frame or similar sliding across the ground and buying you time, just a whole load of empty air between your head and the ground.
If the rider is actively balancing then it doesn’t need to immediately nosedive. In reality that’s the usual effect, but keeping a low center of gravity and trying to keep it balanced go a long way toward a smoother slide/roll instead of a faceplant.
The rider leans forward to accelerate the OneWheel, so they are not "actively balancing" - the OneWheel self-balances "against" their lean. Until the motor gives out, that is.
Simply carving , which is how you turn, requires some balancing by the rider. Going fast over anything but ideal terrain also requires active balancing. If you ride one in any capacity beyond a few mph in a parking lot, you’ll feel it in your legs.
It’s very rare that bicycle is going to mechanically fail and send you flying.
Short of the time I was hit by a car, I’ve never had a bicycling emergency — road or mountain — that I wasn’t able to walk away from through some combination of hoping obstacles and/or putting the bike down in a controlled side-skid.
I've been an active skateboarder, snowboarder, and surfer for 25 years, and have ridden a One Wheel XR for about three years.
All are different in terms of most of the skills needed to do any of them.
The One Wheel is much more like a snowboarding in soft powder than it is like skateboarding, but even then, it's not quite the same. There's a sort of softish center pivot feeling, where on a snowboard it depends on where your edges are.
Skill wise, you don't need any to make the One Wheel do what's advertised. You do need skill to ride it confidently, but you gain those skills as you use it.
I've had one very bad fall on the One Wheel, and it was bad. It slide out while going fast down a steep slippery/sandy hill, and then nosedived, which sent me cart wheeling, then whipped my heel into the ground, shattering it into 23 pieces. I was in bed for 6 months, and didn't walk without help for 12.
I actually think my other boarding skills made the injury worse. I reacted as if the board was a skateboard, where a sideways slide is something I'm super comfortable with and do on purpose. That reaction was to lean deep, counter to the forces of the slide. The big fat gripping tire of the One Wheel bit in, then acted as a fulcrum with my body as the lever, and I just went sailing.
The advice from the GP to have One Wheel-curious people try a skateboard first is indeed good advice. It won't teach you how to ride a One Wheel, but it will teach you how hard the ground is.
Another good option for new riders is to learn to use a balance board first (like a Vew-Do). At the very least, step on the Onewheel while it’s powered off, slowly raise it to level and hold, then alternate slowly setting down each end and returning to level. If you can do that, you can recover from some situations that would otherwise result in a nosedive.
And another important one: braking. Something that has wheels and can move from inertia will need some mechanism to brake, and to emergency brake, especially on inclined / declined paths.
Here in Barcelona these things are super common. The riders seem to be pretty adept. The problem is more that they don't care about pedestrians, they zoom around while on their phones on the pavement where they're not allowed and zip around pedestrians way too fast.
I don't care if they kill themselves but they're risking other people's safety more.
I know a few people that bought these to commute around town. I always thought they were bat's hit crazy and did try, unsuccessfully, to talk the out of it.
I skateboard when I was younger and generally feel comfortable enough on any board where I can stand sideways. No way in hell I wanted to try these though, the top speed alone masks me way too nervous even with experience skateboarding, surfing, and wake boarding.
I have and ride a onewheel but never skateboarded. It really is a different balance; one-wheeling hasn't helped me a bit for skateboarding skills either.
My take on the safety bit is I would never ride the one-wheel at the top speed the device supports, and would never ride without a helmet or on a road with traffic. It can and will dump you. I've had the battery-out dump (when I knowingly experimented after its low power warnings). Basically if you go faster than you can run out/step and roll out from you're inviting yourself trouble.
Heck, just try skiing or snow boarding. I could never get over my fear of Newtonian motion, even with soft powder to make falling less dangerous, there were always just too many trees around.
Roller blades and ice skating are similar before you learn braking. I used to get Aron d on my rollerblades a lot, in a time before helmets were more common.
Both are far more forgiving than skateboarding, even given the speeds you're sometimes wiping out at.
You just sort of bounce down the slope, and it hardly even scuffs up your snow gear.
Wipe out at a quick on a skateboard - the pavement has no give, and you're not all bundled up because it's summer. You're getting road rash, minimum, maybe some more serious damage to bones, head, etc.
Rollerblades, not quite as bad. They aren't constantly trying to run away from you. Similar failure mode though.
Ride in the middle of the run to avoid the trees! Falling on hard pack is an excellent way to jolt yourself awake ;) In any event, carving at high speed keeps your body pretty close to the snow.
Was high speed carving a couple of years ago. Blew a turn and rag dolled. Broke 2 vertebrae in my neck and two in my back. Fractured the back of my skull. Speed + impact can get intense.
Ouch! Personally I try to keep speeds to the 40s now. Worst thing I ever did was start using those run tracking apps which conveniently also give you your speed. Got in a competition with a friend on the other coast and was regularly hitting 55+ on runs that a wipe out could easily end in the trees. What stopped me was when a late teen girl did just that and died going at far slower speeds.
What I like about snowboarding is it feels fast, even when you're going not-that-fast (at least in my case). I once had a friend video me coming down the hill, and when I watched the video, I thought: wow, I thought I was going much faster than that!
> It's just completely not-an-option to fail on such a device at cruising speed.
I recently flew off a normal bicycle because someone spilled oil or something in the middle of a roundabout. The helmet has a large dent, broke my arm.
I'd need full motorcycle gear before I try a monowheel/Onewheel/etc.
Think how many times a toddler entertains the carpet with his face whilst learning to walk and run - years of training is involved in us walking normally.
You need similar training to learn these other devices which can operate VERY unexpectedly compared to normal balancing.
The gamut of human capability when crashing vehicles is SO MUCH larger than most people realize. The average bike commuter probably has a much higher chance of injury in a solo crash than someone who's skated for decades on a onewheel. When I see discussions of safety I rarely see "get good at crashing" brought up, but it's such an important skill.
When I ride my bike I'm always hopping up curbs at speed, doing quick whip skids/ted shreds etc, not just because it's fun, but because those are the skills you need to stay alive in abnormal situations. It's honestly kind of baffling to me that most people don't actively work on expanding their safety envelope.
You can get good at crashing, and at avoiding crashes, and when you do you can either do the same things safer, or do more fun things with the same level of safety. This is why Alex Honnold isn't dead (yet).
> When I ride my bike I'm always hopping up curbs at speed, doing quick whip skids/ted shreds etc, not just because it's fun, but because those are the skills you need to stay alive in abnormal situations.
I've cycled to work for 15 years, and I've never hopped up a kerb and I don't even know what a whip skid / ted shred is.
I used to commute through London by bike. Like the cliche I was I ended up riding a fixie (everything else either got stolen or broke).
I found through trial and error that riding aggressively was safest, not because it was inherently safer but because everyone would take note of the idiot hooning around too fast and take extra caution. Of course the failure mode here is when someone doesn’t notice you…
Years later I now commute by bike in Cornwall where the local population is ignorant of cyclists. I ride an electric cargo bike with my son on the back and I’m incredibly conservative.
There’s no real difference in incidence of accidents, but incidence of “near-miss” and severity of possible accident? Hands down riding conservatively with no hopping around is safer. Duh! ;)
> I've cycled to work for 15 years, and I've never hopped up a kerb and I don't even know what a whip skid / ted shred is.
My commuter e-bike weighs a solid 80lbs fully loaded. I'm not hopping curbs or doing "whip skids" on it. I basically ride it like a touring motorcycle.
I think your chances of ever encountering a truly abnormal situation on a bicycle (that you couldn’t get out of with knowledge of how to use your brakes) is not something that happens to most people even once in their lives.
I once took a bike safety class that included practicing "quick turn", "rock dodge", and rapid braking. (I guess the last is included in "how to use your brakes".)
I'd like for my skills at each of these to be better than they are today, and I ride my bike quite a bit.
I rode in London, a lot. Fast, too.
Couple of accidents, once slipped off a pedal it speed, ran over my foot, but stayed on (thanks, physics), once got too close too a rising curb and couldn't steer, hit a fence at speed, got deep cuts and lots off bruises, but bike took most off the damage.
Have had accidents since, usually from heavy breaking, with complication leading to launching over the front.
I cannot see how these boards could be safer, any dismount at equivalent speed would need considerable skill to not face plant, and any complications would just add energy too the impact.
That or you could simply quail too stop in time and hit something (like a car door opening, or a truck pulling out, or that kid/dog that ran in front of you)
I've only crashed once in Copenhagen, when a tourist turned left directly from the right side of the lane.
Oh, and once when I was so drunk I fell off 2 seconds after getting on the bike.
In London it's necessary to plan a quieter route, using roads most people don't even realise exist. It can't be as nice as the Netherlands, but it can be OK.
A toddler's tiny mass, along with a rubbery and flexible body, allow them this luxury. An adult's mass quickly runs afoul of the above mentioned physics-gut-check.
That greatly depends on the surfaces involved and the persons skills.
I’ve fallen off the back of a galloping horse before as an overweight 6+ foot guy and been fine, but that frequently causes severe injuries. I doubt a one wheel rider is dealing with significantly more energetic collisions. They are however dealing with the dangers of urban environments.
Replace body fat with muscle mass and you'll have found the sweet spot. Muscles need to protect and hold everything together to protect them from shock. They also provide more of a barrier.
Body fat is just extra weight, it's not going to hold up anything.
I’d wager the primary factor is how you land, whether you hit your head, etc. If you land on your buttocks first it likely wouldn’t be as bad as landing flat on your back and striking your head. Although getting that much shock/compressive force applied to your spinal cord probably isn’t great either.
Had an electric longboard and loved it. I did normal long boarding for a short time but found the electric variant much much safer because I could break much better than “slowly grind foot on the ground”
Had one crash, fractured my hand, used it for a while at very low speeds to get around my neighborhood, then sold it
Still very very fun and may get another one for my neighborhood at some point, but one crash makes you realize that, yes, you are in fact not invincible
They changed the article after I got the quote from there. You can see the original quote ("The deaths came as a result of head trauma, with at least three of the accidents happening with the rider in a helmet") in Google Search results, but if you click on the article, the sentence isn't there anymore
- Most motorcycle helmets sold in the US are inadequate DOT helmets. ECE 22.05/22.06 helmets are literally 50 years ahead of the DOT standard, but you have to specifically seek one out in the US to get one.
- Most people purchase helmets in too large a size.
- Many people do not correctly adjust the helmet straps.
1. Doesn't do a great job protecting the face or the side of the head;
2. Not designed for motorized vehicles, it can't absorb enough the kind of forces involved in these incidents.
You need a full face helmet, designed for motorized vehicles.
A motorcycle one is great, but probably an overkill (no pun intended).
There are good downhill helmets that can do the job well enough. Fox and Leatt are trustworthy brands. There are other good ones. It should be obvious, but don't trust Chinese brands.
I got a Boosted board and basically bought all protective gear and did laps around a school find all about said physics before using it as a daily last-mile transport. Helmets are so important.
This. I own two Pint Xs. Ride almost every day for three years. Had two nose dives at full speed and ran both out. I'll never upgrade to a faster model for this reason. You can't run out a nosedive going any faster. Also, the Pint X is just so nimble and fun. To me it's the sweet spot.
> This is the first thought that comes to mind: there's no way to bail, 0% chance. It's just completely not-an-option to fail on such a device at cruising speed
This is completely false. Bailing off these things at a variety of speeds is absolutely a skill you can learn. Some bails can be ran put, some are better handled with a roll or a controlled slid on your gear. Higher speeds always carry higher risks in a fall, but "cruising speed" is an individual choice and can easily be one of that you have the skills to safely bail at.
There are always risks, like in any extreme sport, but those risks can be managed with the combination of skills, equipment and good judgement.
I do highly recommend that people who want to buy a device like this take the time to learn the risks and not rush themselves to ride at high speeds before they build their skills and understand their equipment.
I had a good laugh with a co-worker a few weeks back when we saw a chick wearing sunglasses with her hands deep in her hoody pockets riding a similar single-wheeled vehicle at an intersection. Looking cool trumps common sense for certain personality types.
These sort of snide remarks are so closed minded, maybe she spent a lot of time honing her craft. I can probably ride my brakeless track bike in SF traffic with a higher safety margin than most people on a normal road bike. Don't underestimate human skill.
I know a handful of people that are absolute zealots when it comes to One Wheel and electric unicycles, riding all kinds of crazy contraptions, and doing so with incredible skill. They all still wear helmets and pads, all it takes is some wet leaves and you’re going to have a really bad day.
You sound like the people who explain that they're good drivers while using instagram on a phone because they have a lot of experience driving cars and using phones.
Which is unfortunate because one of these things has an energy of 1MJ and the other has an energy of 50kJ, claiming some sort of equivalency is totally unrealistic.
You’re right, they’re not equivalent at all. When you’re in a car you have all manner of protection around you to shelter you from injury if you crash. The other, uh
It's not about you, it's about hurting others, you're welcome to set your risk tolerance wherever you like, the problem is how your actions effect others.
That's not why, I ride without brakes because it fundamentally changes the space I am operating in. If I want to ride with a reasonable safety margin (I do) I have to think about the world in a completely different way. I enjoy that.
Think of it akin to driving a little car with skinny tires on twisty roads. You're shrinking your envelope so you can spend more time near the edges where it's fun.
Until you drop a chain with clipless shoes with clipless shoes on, so you can't even shoe brake very well like BMX riders do. I had that happen with MTB shoes on, and I completely wore down one of the lugs. I've also accidentally unclipped, before I switched to running my Time ATAC cleats reversed which I think is an old messenger trick.
And that is why I only ride my NJS frame on country roads, not in the city anymore :)
I'm a strong advocate for front brakes, but to me it seems damn near impossible to drop a chain on a fixed gear transmission. Some foreign object would need to be overlapping the chain plane somehow, which sounds like you're already crashing anyway. I think it's far more likely for the chain to outright break.
I've had it happen a few times, and on a few different bikes. Usually the cause is a chain that is too loose, and especially if the wheel is cocked to the left due to the drive side of the wheel being pulled forward from hard pedaling.
One chain tensioner on the drive side is a good preventative measure, I prefer both sides since it makes things easy.
Competence is a larger factor in safety than equipment in many cases, yes, which is why the girl is probably still alive and uninjured. Even so, I wouldn't mind having some safety equipment as a backup.
Competence is a large factor in not getting into unsafe operating conditions. Once outside the envelope, it's only a matter of time before you're unlucky.
> You can't fall onto your arms either, because your inertial speed is faster than your autonomous reflexes.
I don't understand this. Your initial spped along y axis is zero. Falling from a skateboard should be no different from falling from a standing position in terms of the time it takes for your head to hit the ground.
Your head and feet are moving at the same speed. Very fast. The board leaves you behind by stopping. You now put one foot on the ground. Because of friction, your foot stops and goes flying behind you before you can put your next foot on the ground or apply any meaningful weight to it. Because your foot was thrown backwards, it applies angular momentum to your body and you begin spinning around your center of mass (aka, falling forward). Less than 100ms has passed at this point. In the best case, your other foot is impacting the ground, right now, directly under you. But it can't take your weight before it has flung behind you and adding to your angular momentum, forcing you to go face first. It is at this point, you are capable of realizing you are going to fall face first. You have ~80ms to realize this, and put your arms up, before impact. Even if you have amazing reflexes, an impulse isn't reaching your muscles in less than 40ms, that means you need to move your arms from 'keeping balance mode' to 'defensive mode' (including applying resistive power to keep them there) in less than another 40ms. It literally isn't happening.
People who fall from standing by their own volition usually have a sense something is wrong and can fall relatively gracefully. People who are tripped from standing collapse like a sack of bricks. Same thing, you don't see falls coming on these things.
>There's many ways to fall off a skateboard without dying, and to me it's viscerally obvious, absolutely none of them will ever apply here.
As someone who's not a skateboarder but has fallen off various skis, snowboard, cycles, motorcycles etc you can fall off a fast moving thing without dying.
The usual is to kind of flop down taking the force of the fall from standing in a king of rolling motion of to your legs then arse. The main issues are you will slide along which can grate skin if you are not wearing strong clothes, and you may hit your head on something hence crash helmets. The stuff worn by motorcycle racers is probably ideal but maybe an overkill if you are going 20mph rather than 100. Fatalities are normally hitting a hard solid object at speed like a tree or similar.
I have emails talking with Future Motion support as early as 2017 when my Onewheel+ was nosediving randomly at medium/low speeds (ie. Idling back and forth at a red light).
I could never get them to acknowledge it was a defect. I put over 2,000 miles on the board, so I was no stranger to how it should ride. All of my close calls came from it just suddenly powering down on me and are why I lost enough trust in the board to get rid of it.
If not for that defect, it would have been the best tool for commuting in the city. It could ride off curbs, over torn up roads, through grass, and best of all, I could actually bring it inside any building without needing to go through a freight elevator
This is why a regular unpowered popsicle skateboard with some big fat soft wheels (60mm 79a ish is good) is the king of urban commuting in my experience. I ride it over torn up asphault that would have stopped a hard wheeled skateboard in its tracks. I pick the occasional glass piece out of the wheel and its none worse for the wear. I can take it with me anywhere. On a crowded train I can put it in between my legs. The board is very easy to stash out of the way indoors. The board probably weighs 1/5th the one wheel and I never have to worry about charging it or very much maintenance. It also has its own skill progression with tricks that has been really fun and satisfying to get into. ollies are downright useful to learn. I have seen better skateboarders than myself ollie up ~1ft tall curbs commuting through town; I don't think any other micromobility device can take a 1ft curb.
Yeah, the skateboard-to-bike range of mobility tools is just lovely in the city -- they have the property that you can go much faster than walking with far less effort, but you can also carry your transportation (up stairs, over obstacles, etc.) With a car, if you run into a traffic jam or an obstacle or a mechanical failure, you're screwed.
Bikes are definitely on the big end, being things that not everyone can carry, and that definitely can't just be strapped onto your back. (But they do let you carry cargo.)
tell me more about your setup. do you have risers under the trucks? seems like 60mm wheels on a standard popsicle board would be prone to wheel bite without really tight trucks.
I have a 15-year-old Loaded Vanguard (medium flex option) on which I put 85mm "Seismic Speed Vent" wheels. It's great for cruising and commuting, just not great for drifting / slides (too soft, chattery). I have 180mm trucks ... I forget the brand, it's been like 14 years! Anyway, wheel bite hasn't been a problem.
killer, thanks! i have 57mm ricta clouds right now without any risers and get a liiitle but if wheel bite from time to time. sounds like risers are in my future
not (relatively) odd as I'm 16in taller than average; but oddly it inverts itself due to some weird motion-schematic and i had to put the trucks on backwards to compensate.
eScooters are amazing. I wouldn’t last 5 minutes on a skateboard, but I’ve done 1000s of kilometres on an eScooter without incident. I think they should be much more popular where the infrastructure exists.
As a counterpoint, every 1500kms I've had a fall, though usually from bad road, not knowing where the curb cut was, inattentiveness and asphalt bumps, and once, the scooter's folding latch was too loose and the scooter folded while I was riding (at low speeds).
I can definitely recommend falling on grass or mud rather than concrete or asphalt. ;-) And if you can't run off the scooter, rolling sometimes helps.
Even after my experiences crashing on a scooter, I still love riding them. Suspension can help you keep your balance a bit better, but there's always a failure point that's possible to hit if you're not ready for it.
I suspect e-bikes are a bit more stable than scooters, especially with bigger, fatter wheels, but then, you can stick a leg out or run off a scooter, whereas doing either of those things at speed is a bit harder sitting on a bike. And it's a different feel for the road/sidewalk.
Even bigger, fatter wheels might help, like car tires or some e-bikes.
But honestly if we are blue sky dreaming for a second - I wonder if there will come a time when a two wheel kick scooter can self-balance, such as by using more wheels in a different configuration or by using some other kind of board or motor technology to stay balanced more of the time. If a scooter also had the ability to predict if it was going to crash into a curb or pothole or if there were more safety features, even maybe better jackets and jeans that have padding in all the right places to support falls, I’d think we’re moving in the right direction. The gotcha is that we’ve had time to understand what bikes and cars need for safety but we haven’t had as much time to understand what makes for a safer scooter ride yet. Likewise e-bikes too, if you ask me. And jury’s still out as to whether or not bikes or cars have “solved” their safety issues completely.
I should say that scooters are definitely still improving. A new latch design is slightly better than the old one, suspension can help maintain balance in some situations but not others, and some scooters have anti-skid technology so the front and back wheels always rotate at the same speeds at the cost of a loss of power going up hills sometimes.
Short of a true hoverboard, the answer may come in emulating wingfoils on the ocean. A third wheel drops down at speed and pushes the scooter deck into the air. Like lowering a plane undercarriage. So an e-unicycle below the e-scooter. That creates a buffer if a pothole or kerb is hit - the wheel swings back into its holding compartment and the e-scooter wheels make contact again.
Hey, and why not even hold a wing up when the battery is low!? That can also charge it up!
They are fold able but certainly more clumsy when I see them on the train. Also a lot more expensive and yet another thing you gotta charge and eventually replace a battery for. Its also a 30lb hunk of metal still, not everyone can comfortably tote that up and down train station steps all day. Most people I see don't even fold their escooter on the train just hold the handle, roll it in and have the tail out and let people deal with stepping over it. Makes me think transit as we know it wouldn't even work if everyone got one of these things or an ebike and took up so much extra space as a result.
> Makes me think transit as we know it wouldn't even work if everyone got one of these things or an ebike and took up so much extra space as a result.
I’ve been wondered something like this too when I see people bring their scooters into a restaurant, the gym or other indoor spaces. I get that you don’t want it stolen but it would untenable if everyone did it.
My theory is the number of people in a city willing to commit bike theft is finite, and more bikes in public isn't going to draw out very many more thieves out of the woodwork since bikes are already easy to quickly find to steal in public. That means if the world changes and you get everyone biking, rate of bike theft drops down low enough where its something most people don't think of, like how grand theft auto is an extremely rare occurrence despite there being plenty of expensive cars parked on the street.
At that point I suspect there would be dedicated parking - on the light rail near me there is a spot for luggage with ceiling hooks for hanging your bike
Yeah some train cars do have a dedicated spot for bikes and bulky stuff, even with a little bike sticker on the door to label them as such. But It still comes at a big cost. I'd say in the space three people with three ebikes can fit, you can probably fit at least three times as many people standing and hanging on the pole. Plus in the chaos of the few seconds the train waits with the doors open they can be a hassle and are sometimes even a source of door delays moving past people and unloading all this equipment.
I've got a Brompton folding bike and it's really a great way to move through a city.
It's not as compact as your device, but it gets quite small when folded for storage, and there's a configuration where you fold it down except for the handlebars and can push it around like a little cart.
I can second that a Brompton is an awesome city bike. I had one in Boston, and besides the aforementioned utility, it got compliments from people from every possible demographic. They put a smile on damn near everyone's faces.
Get a good pair of padded gloves though. The small, high pressure tires are a punishing ride over shitty pavement. I.e., the kind that's found everywhere in Boston.
I confirm this behavior and this is also the reason I vot rid of the board. Nosedives at red light are not fun at all when you are standing next to a road full of traffic.
A onewheel is supposed to self-balance at all times. A nosedive would be when it failed to engage in the expected self balancing behavior, rendering it suddenly unrideable.
You’re riding a Onewheel, you lift your foot completely off the back of the board. How is it physically possible for the Onewheel to continue self balancing in this state?
on my electric unicycle, it is perfectly capable of of counteracting the entirety of my weight on my toes to come to a stop. idk if onewheels are different
> Once the device senses that it is getting dangerously close to these limits, it shuts off. This wouldn’t be a big problem on a regular motorized scooter, moped, or other comparable device, but the Onewheel has self-balancing technology that requires power. Instead of simply cutting off additional forward momentum and letting the user coast to a stop, the board lurches violently forward into the ground as soon as the motor stops, according to the reports of injured users.
It was discussed in the article. They're adding a vibration and audible warning once the motor reaches its limit, or in any other edge case where the board cannot supply the proper counterbalance.
Why this feature wasn't implemented after the first prototype ever made is completely beyond me. Seems like a literal no brainer. The "bump" feedback can easily be mistaken for an uneven road surface (ask me and my broken ass wrist how I know) but a board buzzing and audibly yelling at you is hard to mistake.
The nose starts lifting and it’s quite obvious. I’ve heard the term “Captain Morganing” in multiple groups of riders, because that’s how it feels if you’re not aggressively leaning into it to go faster.
The GT already has an audible alert, it’s less obvious than pushback.
They’re probably talking about when you try to mount the board after waiting/dismounting at a red light, but the motor doesn’t actually engage and it just falls forward
It seemed like vernon99 was talking about nosediving from a complete stop(trying to go from motor off -> motor engaged but the motor doesn’t engage), whereas in the post you linked to, I was talking about starting from having the motor engaged already at a low speed (ie <5mph slowly moving back and forth waiting for a light) and then the power would just drop out.
I read it as they’re stopped stationary at lights, balancing on the board (so both feet off the ground), and at some point the One Wheel just decides to turn the motor off.
If I had to guess, it sounds like the motor hits some thermal limit and cuts out. Which would explain why it happens at red lights often, lots of high torque motor excursion performing small moves to maintain balance, but little to no airflow because the motor isn’t moving fast enough to pump air through itself.
> If not for that defect, it would have been the best tool for commuting in the city.
Except for that part where you're going faster than the fastest sprinter, with a high center of gravity. Even with a helmet, and no explicit defect, these things are inherently extremely dangerous by their very design.
It’s unfortunate that so many people fail to recognize the inherent danger and choose to blame the device instead of their abilities.
Anyone who can’t control their balance on the fulcrum of a kart tire — under their own muscle power — trying to go fast on one of these boards is outright reckless.
For example, the same year there were 100 times that many deaths due to cars. 40k. Would be unnacceptable if this mode of transport were introduced today.
I ride my bike, a lot. And I got passed once or twice a week for about a year by a guy on one of these that I assume was modified because it would go at least 25-30mph. No helmet on and he’d pretty belligerently pass me and pedestrians with little margin. Then I didn’t see him anymore.
Similarly, I used to see these a lot last year, but I've only seen one person near me riding a one-wheel recently. Sadly, he was riding it with what looked like his 3 year old daughter holding on to his knees for dear life. I wanted to say something, but I assumed they're just going "to the store" nearby. But still... hurting yourself is one thing, but riding an e-scooter or one-wheel with young children seems like quite another...
This is one of those situations where I think it makes loads of sense for the product to have open source software. I guess it would make clones easier but I hear there’s already third party open source code for onewheels so they can’t prevent it. But if the mainline code was open source, some engineer would spend three weeks chasing down these bugs and submitting patches and everyone would benefit. Instead, they ship buggy code and put users and their business at risk. The business world has this attitude that proprietary closed source systems should always be the default, and open source needs justification. And further the business types tend not to know very much about open source, so they stick to what they know. But I don’t think these assumptions really make a lot of sense, as open source would help so many issues we see today, even from the business’s perspective.
> I guess it would make clones easier but I hear there’s already third party open source code for onewheels so they can’t prevent it.
I suspect a lot of the fear of open source is driven by the uncertainty of how big the "easier" in this sentence is.
On the competitors side, what if it's currently taking up 90% of your competitor's time just to understand what you're doing and make a rough not-quite-as-good imitation, whereas if it was open source that time drops to 5% leaving them much more scope to improve on top?
Plus, there's fear about security too. Sure nobody should rely on security by obscurity, but that doesn't mean it can't be a helpful thing and what if hackers spend more time reviewing the code you release than friendly bug finders do? I personally have no idea if there's any data on whether OSS has better, the same, or worse track record on average for being hacked, or if there've been studies on how often hacks happen with or without source code being available, etc. but regardless of the actual odds, it feels like the business equivalent of leaving your house's front door open 24/7, so it can be an emotional argument as much as anything.
And like you said, the current default expectation is closed source as default, so the decision makers find safety in making the choice that feels less risky unless they can be sure it will bring big enough positives to be worth it.
> But if the mainline code was open source, some engineer would spend three weeks chasing down these bugs and submitting patches and everyone would benefit.
That assumes that the problem is buggy code, isn't it? What if it is buggy hardware? What if it is the electronics that is glitching out?
It’s challenging for many businesses because they worry they are one bad incident away from bankruptcy while also knowing that their staff is not perfect.
They assume they are shipping bugs and in some cases they are intentionally shipping bugs to make deadlines. It’s scary for a business to decide to make those bugs public even though most of us know the end result is better product quality and higher social capital.
> They assume they are shipping bugs and in some cases they are intentionally shipping bugs to make deadlines.
I am sure they are, but companies making products that relate to human safety simply should not do this.
> even though most of us know the end result is better product quality and higher social capital.
I agree. I guess I wish there was more education about this in our higher institutions and I suppose at conferences. They should be asking questions about what is best for their business and we should be sharing stories of how open source can work in big business.
At the same time, I’m doubtful that software bugs in the proprietary code are related to the vast majority of these failures people describe. The only legitimate issues I’ve seen are caused by sensors (either the foot sensor itself, or improper mounting usually related to grip tape) or water damage.
A Onewheel attempts to self balance. To accelerate, you lean the direction you want to go. As your speed increases, the board starts tilting the nose up to signal it’s reaching its limit. Powering the motor requires energy, and self-balancing requires additional energy beyond that, so a safe amount of headroom needs to be reserved to accommodate for variations in terrain and rider movements.
When the noise starts tilting up, there’s nothing to stop the rider from leaning forward more, which also signals to accelerate. This is called “pushing through pushback” and it’s required to go more than ~16-18 mph.
Imagine the extreme case where you quickly lift your rear foot off the board. Obviously it’s going to stop suddenly, and you’ll fly through the air and smash into the ground. Every nosedive is exactly this scenario, just slightly less extreme.
Once I grasped this simple concept it became obvious that every fall was my own fault. This is why I recommend new riders practice balancing with the board powered off. If you can’t easily do that, you have no business pushing through pushback.
The boards being “fixed” by this recall are getting a new feature that makes the board vibrate at high speeds. This is done by modulating the motor, it requires no new transducer. The only “failure” is of the rider being oblivious to the signal the board is sending.
Source: own a V1, Plus, and GT; ridden thousands of miles on my own and other’s boards; ran a meetup and met a huge variety of rider types; once raced in the GoPro Games; crashed hundreds of times including the obligatory bone-breaking incident resulting in surgery
tl;dr: Future Motion is anti-consumer, haptic feedback is overdue, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the Onewheel. Every nosedive is ultimately due to rider error.
I’ll also point out that I’m a FOSS fanatic, and I completely agree that single-wheeled self-balancing boards will gain increased reliability and performance thanks to the VESC community openly sharing their progress.
This is orthogonal to riders accepting they’re participating in a fun but very dangerous board sport.
I ride electric unicycles and I have a question about these OneWheels: when you are rolling, the wheel self balances, right? And when you are reaching the power limitations of the board, does it let you know of this in any way?
The EUC will either tiltback (the wheel will literally stop you from leaning even more, so you are forced to lean man) or it will beep very loudly for several seconds, before it finally cuts off either because you fried the board or because the wheel is protecting itself.
It has a very obvious pushback effect. I haven’t ridden an EUC, but I suspect the difference is you only have part of each foot as leverage to counteract it, so the device can more easily counteract the rider trying to push through it. Turn the rider sideways with each point of contact about a foot out from center, combined with a much smaller tire and lower wattage motor, and it’s easy for the rider to counteract it all the way to the system’s limit.
Then again I’ve seen videos of EUCs doing nearly double the top speed of a Onewheel.
It’s all relative to the rider’s ability and willingness to continue stomping the accelerator as it increases in resistance.
It has a tilt back feedback. However it is possible to miss it and there is not much buffer after you hit the feedback point.
I believe they just released a new firmware along with this recall and they have added something new. Might be vibration or sound but I can't remember exactly what.
Yes that’s correct, the firmware update is to provide haptic feedback by modulating the motor to cause vibration. It sounds like a great idea, hopefully it works well.
The idea of sound + vibration notice of porential power related shutoff was requested openly and repeatedly at least since 2019.
If this is such an innovative and important feature, there is no reasonable way to explain why it took the company so long to release it.
Here’s the announce copy from their email on the update:
“Today we're releasing an innovative new safety feature called "Haptic Buzz". Haptic Buzz is an audible and tacti e alert that riders hear and feel when nearing the operational limits of the board.
Haptic Buzz provides riders with additional feedback that is immediate and intuitive so they can ride with more confidence than ever.”
Sounds like a great improvement. I just installed it on my GT, looking forward to trying it out.
If you have more technical details I’m interested to understand how it works. In the distant past I started my career in a power electronics research lab, building motor drive systems among other things, so a deep dive into HapticBuzz would be amazing.
went down this rabbit hole recently and ended up getting a folding ebike
once you start scaling up 2 wheel scooter wheels to become big enough to comfortably ride anywhere in a city that wasnt explicitly designed for scooter traffic (nyc for example), the weight of the whole scooter starts surpassing even lighter ebikes (60 lb+), without the benefit of lower costs or more transportability (few/none 500W+ scooters can be carried comfortably through a narrower nyc restaurant door)
That’s correct. I have the smallest offering from the manufacturer you linked and it’s super portable (30lbs) but the ride is bumpy even on relatively smooth road.
You do get used to it but never feels quite as safe as a bike.
Any thoughts on the mechanics behind this? For any wheel size and range, a scooter naively seems like it is going to have strictly less metal than an e-bike, so I would have thought they would be lighter.
The frame of a bicycle is probably a lot lighter, as a sort of triangulated truss - compared to the "solid beam" style of a scooter. Disadvantage is it takes more space.
You don't pedal on an scooter, so the battery needs to be big enough to carry around both you and the larger battery (adding weight). Conversely, e-bikes can assist your pedaling (rather than having to replace it in all cases) so they can be lighter.
Isn't range a big factor here? Like, the shortest-ranged brand-name electric kickscooters have a range of like 15 miles, while that's the most you can get out the longest-ranged onewheels.
It seems like it'd be possible to offer ultralight kickscooters that would be an apples-to-apples comparison with the onewheel that could fold down to the same collapsed size.
there was a much larger variety of these exact kinds during the pandemic, but trying to find one these days is hard, and the used ones have company names that no longer exist
the smaller and lighter they are, the more integrated and specialized parts they have, for which replacements need to come directly from the manufacturer :(
still kind of crazy, the sheer variety of models that are still on youtube videos from just a couple years ago, that are no longer even possible...
I have a 2017 Evelo Quest One that’s wrapping up it’s 6th year now. It’s been almost entirely hassle free besides general maintenance and a battery replacement after ~4 years. It looks like the company replaced it with the Evelo Dash.
There’s lots of good folding electric options right now, but if your budget allows for it, I’d *highly* recommend looking for folders with Gates drives. You will be able to roll and hold the bike folded between your legs without worrying about wiping grease all over your pants(or some unfortunate soul who bumps into it). It’s also one of the few things that lives up to its hype — it’s been entirely maintenance-free over the last ~6years I’ve been riding
>> I’d highly recommend looking for folders with Gates drives.
Back in '07 I was working in automotive electric steering systems and the design called for a belt between motor and ball-nut. I was shocked the safety analysis was OK with that, but the durability and test data said it would be fine. We used Gates belts. I've never heard of any problem with those systems which are 15 years old now. Apparently their belts are of top notch reliability.
i ended up going with the cheapest one that can still carry me around far enough (both ways) comfortably: https://www.amazon.com/HITWAY-Electric-Removable-20-55mile-B... (it was 800 when i purchased, also available under a number of different brand names if you search for things like 'foldable 20 inch fat tire ebike')
every brand's advantages just started blurring together until someone said "it's just going to be stolen anyway..."
with the money i saved by getting a cheaper bike, i bought the most expensive lock, to keep the thing from riding away :)
I have one but it's quite heavy and designed more around cargo, trips to the grocery store etc. I have used to it commute into town to go to the office a few times and it works ok for it, but if I started doing that every day I'd probably buy something more 'commutery'.
What is the commutery-ness issue? The tyres do look chonky which might be inefficient for long-ish distance, or is it a bit small for long rides? Or is the maintenance a bit much for a daily?
Yeah it's got wide tires (and they are pretty small in diameter as well) and it's a stepthrough with an awfully heavy frame. I might go with something like the radcity if I were going to commute daily. Currently that commute is only 6ish miles though and I'm still mostly WFH, so it's not as critical.
Rad does consider it a commuter bike, I just consider it a tad non-optimal but not anything terrible. Great for neighborhood errands though. My neighborhood 'main drag' is great for a little shopping/eating but is about a mile and change away so it's certainly walkable but I wouldn't want to lug groceries a mile up a hill so the bike is perfect. Haven't touched my car all summer unless I was getting out of the city.
It is a bit small. I think they rate it for people who are 5'10" max, which is my height to get full leg extension. While it does fold it is quite heavy so if you are thinking about a scenario where you drive the edge of the city and bike the rest of the way in just know that getting it in and out of a trunk is a bit of a wrestling match.
Maintenance-wise, no big complaints in almost a year and a half. I had a flat tire and was able to find a replacement tube no problem at a local bike shop. I've had to replace the brake pads and frayed up the brake cable in the process so I replaced that too, did all the work myself cost me maybe ~$20 in parts. Considering swapping the brakes for some 'hybrid hydraulic brakes' aka cable pull hydraulics, those will run me a couple hundred bucks for the pair, the work seems easy enough if you've ever swung a wrench. Did some lubing of the chain... No battery issues, no controller issues.
There are plenty of compact options for sure, but I haven’t found any as ‘hassle-free’, at least when I reach my final destination :)
I also have a folding e-bike which has larger and wider wheels than a scooter, which is preferable in my opinion. The problem with scooters and e-bikes, even folding ones, are that a lot of buildings will not let you take them indoors. Or most will have you use a freight elevator, which is operated manually AND has set hours that it’s run.
There’s also the difficulty of storing/locking them if you go out for dinner or some other event. Something as small as a Onewheel that you could pick up and walk with, and is small enough to store under a table, or take on a train without blocking anyone is a dream in this sort of environment.
Edit: I should also note that I’m speaking from my very NYC perspective.
Definitely eskate. I've had a boosted v2 for six years and it's awesome, but the options out there now from backfire and meepo are insane step ups in speed and battery life, for the same money or less.
I love it especially as a last mile option in conjunction with buses and trains.
That seems like the best option. Adding a motor to a longboard is just enhancing a known proven quantity. It won't have the maneuverability of a onewheel or the all-terrain ability, but longboards are definitely a proven vehicle for roadways so motorized ones seem fine.
Maybe there's some variation of the kickscooter that can meet the portability and compactness of a onewheel. Something that focuses on the foldability of the old Razor scooters. But that still wouldn't be as convenient.
Fundamentally, the onewheel seems like a personal-mobility answer to the V22 Osprey: a vehicle with amazing functionality and versatility in its happy path, but is fundamentally unsafe in failure because of the basic physics of the situation.
edit: onewheel, not longboard, in the final paragraph.
Some of the arguments made were about bringing the scooter inside a restaurant.
You stay in a restaurant one or two hours at most, and you simply wouldn't go there by bike if it's raining. It's unlikely to suffer from rust.
Likewise theft only tends to happen when a bike is left in the same location for extended periods of time. Defeating a good bike lock takes a special kind of people and tools, and your bike is unlikely to be spotted then stolen in a hour or two. One solution is also to park it in a relatively discreet location, or you could go for an area full of bikes (double-edged sword; more bikes means it's lost in the sea, but also that it's a prime location for thieves. Then again if you have a functional metropolitan police they'd be watching such locations).
Personally I use an e-bike in London, I attach it everywhere outside, I never had a problem despite my bike being very cool-looking (it's a British equivalent to Super73). While London is certainly more civilized than New York City, it does have significant crime as well in certain areas.
I've been using the Segway mini for years and think it's amazing, it hits all those things you mentioned.
Its only problem is that it's no longer sold, and mine is starting you show its age. My wheels and battery need changing, but I'm not sure if anyone can actually do that anymore.
The Segway, at least originally, had considerable redundancy in the control system. I think they had four gyros and four accelerometers arranged in a tetrahedron. If you have four set up that way, you can get out info for all three principal axes, plus an error value that indicates sensor trouble. So failure can be detected quickly.
The board would completely disengage and the nose would drop. The best I can explain the feeling is that it felt like I’d go from tapping the gas to pushing the clutch all the way down. There would be no ‘pushback’ from the board beforehand. Sometimes it’d happen even when starting from a standstill.
From what I remember, the blue power light would be on, but it would take restarting the board for it to engage properly again.
I can absolutely assure you that ‘aesthetics’ don’t play any role in any of my commuter options :)
I also stand by this: The Onewheel was the most versatile commuter option I’ve ever used in NYC.
If failsafes were added that didn’t rely on ‘maintain balance while skidding on your nose or tail at 15+mph in traffic if the power decides to randomly cut off’, I’d likely buy it again.
You can forcefully pivot it if you wish to turn in place while stationary. Otherwise you lean on the side and accelerate, the wheel is huge and there is enough sidewall to lean on to. You can perform pretty sharp turns. I'd also do a back and forward move, like a 3 point turn but rapidly and within something like 20cm space.
I have a Onewheel XR. Mine took a nosedive at pretty low speeds and I broke my arm. Onewheel blamed me, I had a lot of experience on the XR and a lot of time skateboards and skates. The device problems, I’m happy they are acknowledging that. I don’t like that it is a voluntary recall. I don’t want store credit, I don’t trust Future Motion or their products.
I also had an XR. Put 200 miles on it with a number of close calls then a big fall. It was starting up the street in front of my old place which has a decent incline. Thing just stopped and I went into the concrete.
I raced ski team in high school and have done a lot of risk sports stuff. But I had seen enough videos and read enough stories before I bought the board. So I was padded up at knees, elbows and helmet when it happened.
I still took a major blow to the shoulder that I had to get X-rays for and sustained surface injuries that still bears scars. I also have an ankle injury from a run-off save prior from a nose dive prior to that fall.
I decided then that I was selling the board because I had too much important stuff that summer to look forward to, and that I was not likely to get to enjoy it if I kept using that product.
Like others in this thread, I contacted the company about the nosedive, explaining my injury and concern that the product could not be ridden safely. I asked if they would please consider taking the product back.
They ignored my injury, and information provided about the fall. Instead they made a point it highlight the high resale value of the product and that I should do that.
The company has a class action suit in some status of pending. I have read more than enough about this company’s behavior since to be watching and waiting for what seems inevitable. I am expecting my own exchange may make it into discovery.
For others who didn't read the article (I hadn't when I saw this comment), the store credit is only for owners of older boards, which cannot be 'fixed' with the software update that they're rolling out.
> For early adopters, however, owners can receive a “pro-rated credit of $100 to the purchase of a new board,” according to Mudd. The credit will only be issued after owners confirm that they have disposed of the old model.
I won't have my firmware updated for fear of it also gaining the "drm" Future Motion has been adding to newer boards. Besides I've already put a third party battery in it. I wish Future Motion was, well, cool...
These are the ones that move super fast with a terrible braking system (one wheel) and zero protective gear right? Never seen one in person but I’ve read chatter and seen a video a while back. I mean anyone that jumps out of an airplane should also be prepared for the chute to not deploy.
I’m guessing the difference is that you dont have to sign a waiver for onewheel riding?
The design, maintenance, and alteration of parachute equipment is regulated by the FAA; equipment must be approved under the FAA’s technical standards, and anyone packing a parachute must be an FAA-licensed rigger.
AFAIK there are no such standards (mandatory or voluntary) applied to Onewheel’s devices.
They could have voluntarily applied hardware and software standards from other safety fields (e.g. automotive engineering), but they apparently chose not to.
As the peer commenter said: move fast and break bones.
Every middle aged former skateboarder turned bartender or liquor sales person I know who's gotten on one of these fuckers cracked their face open. You have been warned.
I skated a TON in high school and college, pretty much spent my entire summers skating. Gave it up when I turned “professional.”
When my son was born (about 10 years later) I had a brief crisis of self and thought “you know what would make me feel like myself again? Skating.”
Took me about a month but proceeded to snap my wrist, made it hard to change diapers for a few weeks so it was uh… decided in our household that I’d finally let it go for good.
Thought about getting a OneWheel but to your exact point, am 99% sure user and/or mechanical error would cause me to crack my head open. After reading about this recall, I’m definitely not ever getting one.
This comment is a humorous remark that implies that the person who wrote it is so old and fragile that even looking at a skateboard (one of these fuckers) caused them to lose their ability to use hyphens in their writing. Hyphens are punctuation marks that are used to join words or parts of words, such as in "middle-aged" or "liquor-sales person". The comment is exaggerating the effect of aging and skateboarding on the person's health and grammar. It is also a self-deprecating joke that mocks the person's own lack of hyphens in their comment.
honestly, yes, i really suspect this is true. i’ve been using chatgpt since the beta days to help with studying chinese, and i’ve noticed over the months that its replies have gotten increasingly wordy.
the good thing is that you can tell it to be more concise, less bot-like, not so apologetic, etc., and it’ll trim down its responses for as long as it can “remember” (whatever the token limit is on persistence). it’ll be great when llms have, by default, a bit of persistent memory to remember things like this
>it’ll be great when llms have, by default, a bit of persistent memory to remember things like this
ChatGPT already has this (not sure if it's Plus-only). In your user profile, there's a "Custom Instructions" entry where you can give it persistent prompts.
I think the opposite. This feels like a hallucination to me. There are no Google results for it, suggesting it's not an actual phrase in English. Maybe a rough translation of a phrase in another language?
The original comment started
> Every middle aged former skateboarder turned bartender...
In "proper" written English that should have been "middle-aged former-skateboarder-turned-bartender". But at the end of the comment the author claims to have lost their hyphens (i.e. their ability to use the - symbol). Probably because they were having trouble deciding what parts of that should be hyphenated and just made a joke about it instead.
To be a rare positive voice, I own their newest model, the Onewheel GT, and I absolutely love it. It feels like snowboarding around town. I've put hundreds of miles on it without a single issue.
For safety, I wear motorcycle armor and wrist guards with it, and I keep my maximum speed at ~15mph. Injuries are almost always caused by people not wearing simple safety equipment and trying to go way too fast.
I'd never recommend an adrenaline-adjacent activity, since I don't want it on my conscience if a person gets hurt. But Onewheeling might be my favorite part of the day: it's like having a cabin on the slopes of Colorado, where you're able to step out the front door and immediately have the experience of snowboarding.
So, I won't recommend it per se, but it's as fun as advertised, and you'll know it if you need it.
The plastic stays on my wristguards probably saved me a ton of pain when rollerblading as a kid. Hit a tiny asphalt stone at high speed going down a hill; the guards saved my wrists when I instinctively took the fall on them. I'll never forget the sound of the guards scraping down the street, and how bad it would have been without them.
To add a perspective I haven’t seen yet in this thread, I’ve been riding one of these for 6 years and it’s basically my favorite way to get around.
For me, it has more utility than a bike. I usually go around 15 mph and I’m careful to not nosedive which happens when you go really fast (~20+ on a pint) or accelerate too quickly.
Though, I learned the behavior of the board the hard way. I wouldn’t recommend it to most people even though I love it personally.
I hope Future Motion increases the reliability and safety of the board and keeps refining their product.
> I hope Future Motion increases the reliability and safety of the board and keeps refining their product.
Maybe the concept of this product could work, but would you really ever trust this company again? You may have been lucky but you know others were not, and the company kept downplaying the issues with the device.
It took them this long to finally do a voluntary recall of this device, what's going to happen next time something goes wrong?
This is just my personal opinion, but as a both a programmer and a cyclist, and as someone who saw the OneWheels all over SF --
I just can't trust that any organization will write code well enough to get on one of these things, especially where there is split-second interaction with SF traffic, and where my face being broken is one of the consequences.
(I might trust certain people, but not organizations.)
I don't know if they did anything bad or not, but the very concept seems suspect. I want my body to learn the laws of physics, as on a bike. I don't want my body to have to interact with software that gets updates over time.
You can level similar criticisms at modern planes -- planes worked before software, and people learned over time how to fly them in bad conditions.
They had skin in the game!!! People writing code in a company somewhere aren't personally liable for your face breaking, or the plane going down in flames. I didn't follow very closely, but the recent Toyota/Boeing issues basically seem like typical organizational blame deflection. No skin in the game.
Unlike mechanical systems, this type of software has no end-user/operator repair.
When software is doing too much, then the pilots and operators lose agency.
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So I believe a bicycle (or unicycle) has more agency than a OneWheel. The human is forced to learn it, and it's a STABLE target for learning.
Humans have an intuitive sense of physics, and it can be honed to incredible degrees
This reminds me of those viral videos of indoor cyclists that were going around >10 years ago
It's a perfect example of why you shouldn't underestimate the human's brain ability to learn -- software is not that flexible or reliable; AI is not that flexible or reliable.
I mean think about SLOW the self-driving cars are after 10+ years. Their reaction time and judgement is shit.
I'm not an exceptional cyclist, but I've learned to make decisions safely in 15+ years of riding around SF, through diverse conditions and terrain. It's obvious to me that these capabilities are beyond software.
We can write safety-critical software. Look at NASA’s CMM level 5 processes for some of their flight control software.
I’m not as familiar with applications in other domains, but I know they exist. This is typically not fun code to write. It is bureaucratic and developed over decades. It is more an engineering discipline than most commercial software. And, it is organizational, this is not code written by a single individual. I would not trust that at all. More eyes mean more trust, broadly speaking.
The 737 Max issues were not as much about software as corporate cost saving efforts.
I have no idea if the OneWheel software can be fixed. I’m sure there was real talent that went into it. I suspect the first to market and other financial incentives were big factors in this outcome. Just the fact they are only now, apparently, adding user notification of error states is kind of crazy.
So I agree that certain types of organizations are not trustworthy, but I also think the safest code we have ever written was done by…organizations.
NASA’s code runs on devices that have am very specific missions. They can test all of the edge cases because they’re going from A to B once and they have a decade to prepare that journey. People riding electric scooters and etc will run into more variability each day than NASA will in a whole mission.
I crashed and broke my back on a two wheeled scooter in SF due to a pedestrian walking on a red don’t walk sign, for example.
Plus, none of these companies are doing NASA quality assurance or anything close, so why even compare them to NASA?
I’m saying that organizations can, in fact, write safety critical code. One wheel does not need to account specifically for pedestrians crossing the road, but it does need to behave properly under a wider variety of conditions than a spacecraft or launch vehicle. Give it a decade with a half dozen teams working to making the code correct, and I think you could get there.
I am inclined to think that a commercial entity cannot reliably write safety critical code for a primary income driver. You need different financial incentives and probably a different organizational structure for this to work.
At the risk of derailing my point in minutiae, I suspect Waymo will ultimately deliver safe self-driving technology sooner than Tesla, for example.
Yes, the point is that even without bad software, the world is a dangerous place. Better to not have unsafe, unstable, dangerous vehicles to compound that. It was part my fault and part the pedestrians fault that I crashed, but the real cause was the instability of the platform. If I had been on a bike, I’m certain I could have stopped or avoided the pedestrian.
I'm familiar with similar can't-fail applications in industrial controls engineering. Safety-critical software usually only means enough watchdogs, counters, and checksums that you can be confident everything will shut down if something's not right.
But the Onewheel is a harder problem - you must continue to run even if something goes wrong! There are some industrial processes that are run continuous, you must not ever stop that pump or furnace or the molten metal will solidify or sewage will back up into people's homes or things will otherwise go very, very wrong. To deal with that, you need at the very least one-out-of-two function, redundant heterogeneous parallel motor drivers and IMUs in the Onewheel for example. Most plants - even big automotive lines, where an isolated fault can cost tens of thousands of dollars per hour - do not go to that enormous effort and expense. A consumer product never will.
Just to clarify, they are not just now adding feedback about reaching the limits of the board. Since day one they have had “pushback” which tilts the board backwards in a very noticeable way to let the rider know that a limit (speed, power, torque, battery, temperature) is about to be reached. Unfortunately many, maybe even most riders intentionally ignore this warning and forcibly “push through” the pushback. This update just makes the warning much more annoying in an attempt to change rider behavior.
I feel like this is an engineering cultural issue. Few organizations can produce safety-critical code, say organizations who focus on tail events and long term profitability. And an engineering organization cannot transition from a growth oriented shipit culture to a safety-critical culture.
The thing is this code only has to do one very simple function. It should be a few hundred lines at most. It's easily within the realm of formal verification.
I guess they always thought they didn't need it...
Getting the code right to compute how to drive the outputs when you have good inputs isn't the hard part. It's what happens when things overheat or time out or disconnect or get noisy that's hard; usually you'd just reset but the Onewheel can't do that while you're driving.
Yes that's an obvious fundamental limitation of the entire design - it isn't remotely fail safe. You can't really fix that. You can reduce the chances of failure with redundant hardware and formal verification of the software.
It's not at all clear what the actual problem is here but in this thread we were discussing writing bug free software.
No it is not. You are mistaken. The comment I was replying to was talking about software bugs.
It might be the case that the problem is a hardware issue but the article is extremely unclear about what the problem really is (maybe nobody knows?) and they claim to have fixed it with a software patch.
> This reminds me of those viral videos of indoor cyclists that were going around >10 years ago
The other day my wife showed me this unbelievable performance of a Chinese acrobat unicycling on top of a big rolling globe while doing acrobatics with balancing bowls on her head [1]. Since that site is Chinese language with weird popups, I also found a 10 years later performance by the same lady on youtube [2], but it's not quite as effortless as the first.
I saw a dad with his son together on one (or a similar product) last week. I doubt that they test things like that thoroughly.
It definitely looked like an accident waiting to happen. Both were wearing helmets but they were going pretty fast. I can imagine that smashing your face into the ground will be ugly at those speeds. Especially for a 6-7 year-old with the weight of an adult added on top...
I flew in one a few months ago and was really pissed off that I didn’t know about it ahead of time. I thought when they announced the plane we were on that it was a bad joke (flight had already been delayed many hours). Luckily nothing bad happened but I had to quickly google how they resolved the issue.
The "skin in the game" point is interesting. Imagine if there was a way to buy personal injury insurance for a device such as the Onewheel. Then the insurer has an incentive to audit the code and check for safety hazards, in order to figure out what premium to charge. If you're a customer and you want to know which device is the safest, check to see which has the cheapest insurance.
Why do people get in cabs with crazy cab drivers? There's even a game called "Crazy Taxi"
Because they are confident that the cab driver doesn't want to kill HIMSELF. If he behaves recklessly, he'll face consequences
That is, self-driving cars with remote operators are a moral hazard. If they make a mistake, the operator doesn't face any consequences
This is not a trivial point. If you look deeply into causation, you'll see it in many places
---
Likewise, Tesla's policies of forcing your hands on the wheel are incoherent. They claim to drive you around, except that it's your fault if something goes wrong. Well, that's exactly where I wanted the help.
Definitely check out "Skin in the Game" by Taleb if you haven't
I predict that this will become a recognized limitation of AI. In 10 or 20 years, we'll realize that it was a philosophically incoherent position to claim that a machine is doing something, WITHOUT being liable for the consequences of performing poorly.
And not just incoherent, but bad engineering. Without this vital feedback, it won't operate well, and it won't learn. In evolution, which is the process that has produced machines capable of navigating the world (us), death is a very strong piece of feedback!
Seems it would be easier and more effective to handle this at the source.
Set some minimum standards for the products and require a bond or insurance for them to be sold.
We already set standards for other vehicles and safety critical products (FAA, FMVSS, UL listing, etc). The minimum standards makes a case for culpability through negligence relatively easy.
Requiring a bond or insurance means either betting a substantial amount of your own resources on the fact that you have done correctly, or convincing an insurance company (who are demonstrably passable at assessing risk based on their still being in business) to assess the likelihood of payouts and price your premiums accordingly. If you can’t convince them you made this safe, you won’t be able to afford to put it on the market.
Then instead of expecting somehow that OneWheel is going to cooperate with audits they have no real incentive to participate in, consumers in aggregate to make informed, rational decisions, and a bunch of other things that are unlikely to happen… (The insurance company is just going to base rates on aggregate historical data like they do with cars. Some of you may need to die so we can determine whether the products are safe. Best of luck.) People can just go buy products at the store and be relatively confident that they’re not going to kill them.
I’d wager that markets are generally healthier when people have confidence that generally available products aren’t dangerous. I can only imagine how little I’d purchase if instead of electrical standards and UL listing I had to go talk to my home insurer every time I wanted to plug something else into the wall so I could find out if it was going to kill my family.
The problem is that it takes time. Learning how to go on 2 wheels isn't that hard
Learning how to go on one is noticeably harder as in need 2 axis of balancing, not (essentially) one
Meanwhile they want to sell product that's small and convenient enough to carry, and one wheel gives it advantage in that. And artificial balancing is easiest way to add it.
> I mean think about SLOW the self-driving cars are after 10+ years. Their reaction time and judgement is shit.
> I'm not an exceptional cyclist, but I've learned to make decisions safely in 15+ years of riding around SF, through diverse conditions and terrain. It's obvious to me that these capabilities are beyond software.
This thing is not self-driving. There is MASSIVE gulf between "make a vehicle controllable by human" and "make that vehicle self drive".
All true, but you have to trust the organization(s) that manufactured your bike. And unless you’re paying $Ks of dollars the manufacturing quality is sadly going down.
My main point is: You gotta trust someone. If you trust no one you should move out to a remote uninhabited forest.
No, it's not all or nothing. Good engineering is simple, relies on less, and trusts less -- it doesn't require trusting zero.
I also addressed the difference in the comment -- this type of software has no end-user / operator repair, and the costs of failure are great.
I know how a bike works, and I can repair it. (Time-tested materials like steel frames are also nice.)
I don't know how the OneWheel works. In theory, I might be able to read some of the source code, but that counts for very little. It's certainly more complex than a bike. It also hasn't been tested over a long period of time.
Well it looks like we've had a test... I haven't touched a OneWheel since I first saw them 5 years ago, and now it seems like I have some good info about them.
Totally not, I can take a bicycle into my workshop, check if is made of steel or aluminium, inspect quality of hardware, I can test quality of a weld, hit it with a hammer, etc..
You can't see source code of onewheel, or take out the firmware and run it in isolation.
Software producing companies have the privileges of being protected from inspection, but responsibility of a guy assembling Ikea furniture.
I remember seeing ads for the one wheel the first time, and thinking it must be some kind of joke. Surely no one would have the nads to sell that in the USA? How are they not going to be steamrolled by the liability lawsuits?
Maybe that was part of the business plan in the first place, and they're also sponsoring the inevitable class action big lawsuit through another subsidiary company. Buy the victims off with a little money now in return for large shares of the settlements. 15 years from now when the courts decide they're due money for being stupid enough to get on the thing in the first place, the original company will have been long bankrupt, and the State (ie Taxpayers) will be on the hook to relieve the suffering of the poor victims.
Not to mock people injured on these things; but seriously, just look at it. You embraced the risk when you stepped on it.
Mine is rotting in my garage. I couldn't sell it or give it away given what I know about it.
$100 credit for a new board - no thanks. I'm not giving these assholes another cent and I don't want anything they've touched anyway. Resisting the recall is a full and likely permanent breach of trust.
I've never trusted the design of that thing -- not even to get on it once. It's just so.. dumb. It doesn't have a failsafe mode. At least put some small wheels / rollers on the leading edge so when it inevitably nosedives, it wouldn't dig in. Terrible design.
I ride an electric skateboard (boosted stealth) -- it makes sense to me. If the battery runs out, or if it loses connection to the remote, it turns into a dumb, heavy skateboard. When it fails mechanically (snapped belts, burned out motors), it turns into a dumb skateboard. You can carve to lose speed, you can drag your foot to slow down, you can even slide it like a regular longboard.
Even with all that, I sometimes imagine what could happen if the software glitched and cranked the throttle 100% forward or back - makes my skin crawl. Luckily I've never heard of that happening with any of their boards in however many years.
All that said, I think these types of "last mile" small-scale mobility devices are a very good way to help people decouple from cars, make transit more accessible, and generally take back street space from the monoculture of heavy, dangerous, energy-intensive vehicles.
The motor doesn't have to disengage; when unpowered it turns into a freewheel. The onewheel is perfectly capable of coasting, that's not what causes the crash.
It's the stance of the rider (leaning forward) combined with the sudden lack of acceleration from the motor which disrupts the equilibrium of forces and causes the ensemble to tip forward -- then it all comes to an abrupt stop because the leading edge digs into the ground.
Are you suggesting this as a fix? The wheel never turns on its own, powered on or not. I've put thousands of miles on my pint. I am assuming the onewheel engineers have good reasons for making that choice.
There is a third party accessory to add front wheels called Fangs. They were initially very popular, but most people ended up getting rid of them because they end up making crashes worse. When the front of the board is down, it desperately dumps as much power into the motor as it can in order to attempt to bring the nose up to level, but if it is unable to level out you just end up adding more speed to the inevitable fall.
These devices do have their value, but most users would be better off cycling or walking. From public health point of view replacing cars with these is only a minor improvement.
One of the reasons the Segway was so expensive is they built it like medical devices, with tons of redundancies in its systems for this exact reason. So if one computer glitched out it wouldn’t just chuck its passenger head over heels.
As we know, once hoverboards got really popular the cheap ones (perhaps most?) were NOT built that way. I saw someone nearly faceplant when theirs ran out of battery and stopped on a dime.
Hoverboards are just about the only thing I can think of that look intrinsically more dangerous than a onewheel, just looking at it from a physical design perspective.
My ninebot scooter (maybe not what you're asking, but it's a Segway product) slows down until it can't carry you anymore. First it just can no longer achieve the maximum velocity, then soon it can no longer reach standard speed, and then you're limping along at 4mph and you can no longer climb any grade without pushing. Finally you're pushing.
It's not particularly usable as a scooter without the battery.
The Segway has redundant control circuitry, motor windings, and battery. If there is a failure of any of these I believe it will fault and perform a controlled stop.
Since we’ve not heard stories of it being involved in deaths I assume that the battery stops providing propulsion score it stops providing gyro. (And depending on how the gyro is designed it might keep spinning long enough for it to slow down and stop.)
> What happens to a Segway when it runs out of battery?
A Segway needs electricity to balance itself, so my guess is that when it gets close to running out of battery, it stops by itself and refuses to continue.
From trading the other comments, it seems the Onewheel is just glitchy. They certainly must also have a low-battery cutoff, but I bet it's not accurate in all ranges of temperature and with aged batteries.
A few years ago, I used to see a middle-aged guy riding one of these every single day from his office to his apartment in Downtown LA. Then I suddenly stopped seeing him.
According to a street vendor who saw the accident, the guy's Onewheel froze up on him riding down Grand Ave from Bunker Hill, he went flying, and he suffered severe brain damage. He's been in a coma since then, and his family's lawsuit against the manufacturer is still working its way through the courts.
Yeah after seeing one i was tempted. Seems like a great way to last mile a commute. Did a little research, reddit sub full of people who had been injured being belittled by the regulars. Went with an ebike instead.
I used to use an electric skateboard in the 2010s - very early on in the e mobility movement. Though I knew (and still know) how to skateboard I found it to be pretty dangerous due to the speeds you’re now capable of. Unlike long boarding where you’re forced to learn to slide in order to stop anyone can go 20mph+ and get themselves killed.
The one wheel in a sense is worse because inherently there’s no way to use it without electricity and people overestimate their ability to travel on high speeds on it.
That’s why I ended up going with e-bikes and escooters. I think the nature of the motion lends itself to be inherently safer.
I looked at the skateboards, the onewheel, scooters. I discounted the skateboards and the scooters because i know that small diameter wheels suck. A little gravel and you could be fucked. The onewheel was still interesting, I hit up the subreddit, tons of people talking about how they got hurt mixed with people telling them how dumb they were.. That was enough for me, I bought an ebike instead.
I just bought an electric longboard with large, all-terrain wheels - not for off-roading, but so I don't have to worry so much about the gravel and potholes on poorly-maintained Seattle streets. Seems to work well, so far - I can ride right down the unpaved gravel alleyway behind my house, even. You can still feel the bumps and ruts, but you just roll right along, there's none of the lurching you get with smaller wheels.
Ebikes are both fun and practical, but I don't know where I'd store one during the work day; the skateboard can just come up the elevator with me.
I am also in seattle, I wouldn't want to ride the streets in ballard with a skateboard, even with 'all-terrain wheels'. See a couple of onewheels doing it though.
I store my bike in the bike cage at work, when I go into the office, most offices have them. At home I store it in my apt, we've had a couple of garage breakins that got a few bikes in the last couple of years. My bike is a folding model so I can store it in the big laundry closet I have to get it out of the way.
I'm sure you've both seen and by now gotten tired of this discussion, but storing your high capacity/discharge lithium batteries literally in your home (or apartment, doubly so!!) is unsafe. In NYC alone this year there where 13 deaths directly attributed to li-ion bike batteries exploding from thermal overrun..
Unlike say, justifying using candles or incense because you may have a fire extinguisher......a battery fire will not yield to common extinguisher chemicals. All year round FDs are stuck taking a whole day to monitor/extinguish a battery fire, usually after it's gutted a multi famaly apartment.
Or, maybe HN can tell me I'm wrong finally and that the e-bike battery fire pandemic is over? I am afterall a lazy stay at home who hasn't been on a bike in ages :p
Most of the ebike fires I've looked into are caused by shoddily 'repaired' or damaged batteries while being charged. I charge my battery in a BBQ on the little 'porch' I have outside my apt or just this reason. These batteries are the same as the batteries in most of your electronics the only difference being they are probably quite a bit larger. Obviously we don't worry about charging our phones on the nightstand or our roombas in a pantry but they pose very similar danger.
60mm 79a skateboard wheels here. I go over gravel all the time. Sometimes even loose dirt paths. Patchy asphalt. Cobblestones and brick. Momentum is your friend here as well, faster you go more likely the board chucks out the obstruction. It takes quite a stone to stop these wheels, probably one that would pinch flat my bike inner tube and certainly one that would be very hard to miss unless I was not paying attention. I'm comfortable enough with the small rock situation to even eat breakfast or lunch on occasion while on the board.
Were you looking at razor-style scooters? Before that brand came up with their tiny scooters, pretty much all scooters had wheels around the diameter of these Onewheels. It's why back then we distinguished them as "scooters" vs "razors", while nowadays people seem to mean razor-style when they say "scooters"...
I've been electric longboarding for 3-4 years, and longboarding for longer, and I find rental electric scooters way more dangerous than electric longboards. It feels like there's just no way to bail, since there's a big stick in front of you and you're much higher off the ground. To be honest, I feel similarly about bikes but I can buy that that's a skill issue.
This sentence doesn't make sense to me:
> Unlike long boarding where you’re forced to learn to slide in order to stop anyone can go 20mph+ and get themselves killed.
I agree that electric longboarding is dangerous for beginners who never learned to longboard, but I don't see why that argument doesn't apply to scooters or bikes. Anyone can go 20mph+ on an escooter or ebike too, and it's harder to bail. Moreover, beginner longboarders often go faster than is safe down hills, since they're not practiced at controlling speed and stopping. For the disciplined rider, regardless of skill, electric longboards are safer since it's so much easier to control speed down hill.
Nitpick: sliding is a pretty rare way to stop on a longboard.
I dunno, scooters and bikes have mechanical brakes so there is no need to bail to begin with.
Sliding is rare, true. But at high speeds is the only way to stop. At low speeds I do agree, but the issue is that footbraking requires balance, and even people decent at long boarding can lose control while footbraking.
My main argument against longboard is that there’s no way to stop at high speeds and that steering inherently requires shifting your weight in a way that makes you vulnerable.
This is not to say that no one should longboard, but personally I only do so on flat terrain now.
> Nitpick: sliding is a pretty rare way to stop on a longboard.
To explain for anyone unaware, I primarily footbrake to stop on my longboard - you put one foot out and hold it against the ground and the friction slows you down.
> It feels like there's just no way to bail, since there's a big stick in front of you
Ironically, the most ridiculous and most common way to hurt yourself on a scooter is to bail instead of continuing to ride the perfectly good scooter. You can find hundreds of videos on YouTube of people who upon seeing an obstacle just confidently step off the scooter (still going 15 mph) and eat dirt 0.5 seconds later instead of using the brake and safely stopping almost immediately (these usually brake just fine).
I don't think there's a good way to bail from a bike, but I can't think of a situation I've been in on a bike where bailing would have been a good choice.
There's more chance of bailing if you're on an undersized bike (bmx style) or maybe on a step through design rather than a straight top tube. But I still don't know where you'd apply that; maybe at a skate park, but not on a road and I don't think on a trail either.
I broke my pelvis and elbow while learning to ride a OneWheel+. I overcame the motor’s resistance when attempting to accelerate from a low speed and went flying off the front. Recovery was rough, but not the end of the world.
I still ride the thing. Mostly trail riding; I find the concentration required doesn’t mix well with bumpy streets.
I’ve also had injuries snowboarding and doing other sports.
The recall thing makes sense, but offering $100 to destroy a $1700 toy seems kind of lame.
There is another safety related recall going on right now - this time in the world of cycling. Shimano (the biggest parts manufacturer) is recalling more than 2 million cranks (and it's likely they will recall even more in the future). It seems companies are seriously afraid of US agencies in this area.
For quick reference the affected model numbers are DURA-ACE and ULTEGRA branded cranksets with the following model numbers: ULTEGRA FC-6800, FC-R8000 and DURA-ACE FC-9000, FC-R9100 and FC-R9100-P.
The newer hollow cranks aren't problematic, so it can't be just that it's difficult to make a hollow crank. And it's not even that fancy any more, considering that the $100 FC-R7000 is also hollow.
I bought one, thought I mastered it, ended up in the ER, sold it. Onewheels require a full face helmet and pads. Even under ideal conditions, the device can fail of function different than expected causing the rider harm. I was riding mine off a 2-3 inch curb, which was on a familiar path I took daily, when the nose slammed and I flew off fracturing my rest. The sensation of a OW is amazing at low and high speeds, but the risk isn't worth the reward.
> For the newer Onewheel GT, Onewheel Pint X, Onewheel Pint, and Onewheel Plus XR, a software update with a new warning system is the remedy.
Recall just means “fix needed”. It doesn’t necessarily mean they all get returned to manufacturers. (I’d have gone through half a dozen cars if that was the case.)
I'd say hardware fixes are becoming increasingly less common. As more of the ways devices function rely on software there is less a need to physically change them to correct problems.
There are better solutions than that these days and tons of people building and designing parts for custom built boards that use few or no components from FutureMotion. https://pev.dev
> Overall I would highly recommend going through with this build. It feels pretty close to the real thing and is a fraction of the cost. The build got a little frustrating at some points but that’s just part of the learning process. The board is a bit large which is kind of annoying.
but I didn't read the whole thing in order to know how much experience they came into that project already possessing (or, of course, supporting tools)
The amount of experience you need depends on how deep into doing it you wanna go. The community makes and sells kits and components and there's facebook groups and discords that help answer questions and troubleshoot problems.
You can definitely source components that require no soldering and no 3d design skills and build your own board without pre-existing experience. Sourcing those components may take time since a lot of the best ones have a lot of demand and can't really scale.
The ride I went on yesterday in SF had six riders on vesc boards, two of which the the Floatwheel which is starting to be made at scale by a member of the community in China and sold via cryptocurrency since Future Motion has successfully blocked his ability to accept credit cards.
Not that I wish anyone hurt, I do wonder if there isn't some abandonment of common sense - moving things result in accidents, there's no way to prevent that, and if you don't want to get hurt don't use them. For example, I was cycling through a large park this evening, empty because the weather was gloomy and it was a Saturday evening. Cars, cyclists, walkers and joggers use the road through the park but only myself and one other cyclist were on the long straight heading towards each other. When he was about 20 meters in front of me he suddenly fell into the grass on the side of the road. No potholes, no animals, no gust of wind, no broken parts, ... just over he went. A lapse of concentration? No idea. He climbed back on and continued. Point being that even with perfect conditions people still manage to come a cropper.
I'm normally in the "use your common sense" camp for sure, but with One Wheels, I feel a bit different. They're very easy to ride. It takes about 5-15 minutes to learn how to ride them well enough to go very fast.
I love the thrill of going fast on stuff, but I think the One Wheel and similar devices need to be capped to a "safe" speed (where science determines "safe"). If a firmware update came out that did that today, I probably wouldn't even notice, because I don't ever let it get above 10-15mph if I can help it.
It seems that the problem is that the Onewheel is a fundamentally flawed design that should perhaps not even be legal to sell.
Basically the issue is that the only control available is turning the wheel, but an unstable scooter actually needs two controls: one to balance the board and one to control the speed.
Having a single control means that they are tied and thus that, discounting air resistance, if the user continuously leans forward, then the board has to continuously accelerate up to arbitrary speeds since turning the wheel to balance also results in acceleration.
Furthermore, it seems that they don't even have a motor powerful enough to always be able to balance the user along with air resistance, so if the rider continuously leans forward eventually the motor is no longer powerful enough, the board loses balance and the rider probably falls down and dies.
Not sure how they could even think of selling a design like that or how they are surviving the lawsuits.
The simplest fix seems to be using four wheels instead of one, which also removes the need of active balancing and is a normal proper design. If "leaning to accelerate" is desired instead of a more normal handle with a throttle control, then it should be achievable by adding suspension springs and detecting their extension.
Not sure if it's possible to have a proper design with one wheel; a thing that comes to mind is having a sort of "landing gear" that can come down and make the board stable on demand. An alternative could perhaps be an internal reaction flywheel, but not sure if that works and is feasible.
How do two-wheeled segway devices handle this? If you continue to lean forward and try to exceed their maximum speed, they will somehow tilt you backward and slow down anyway.
(Presumably, enough force on the front edge could cause them to over-tilt, but riding normally, it will forcefully tilt you back and slow down.)
>The simplest fix seems to be using four wheels instead of one
Classic. But that's not enough, you also need airbags and crumple zones. We can't realistically expect everyone to wear motorcycle gear all the time so we need to build it into the mode of transport itself.
I sold my Onewheel because I was seeing more reports of this sort of stuff. Personally never experienced it in about 2.5k miles ridden. I guess I was lucky. The way I've seen people take drops on these things, or modify the electronics can't be good. I've honestly wondered if those little front wheels (called Fangs I think) would become a standard thing.
I haven't personally seen a Onewheel crash, but someone did pass me on my (non-electric) bike with a powered skateboard the other day, and not 10m past, one of the wheels dug into a pavement defect, board stopped, he didn't. Low-ish speed, got away with some scrapes and a bruised ego, but no bones broken.
The fact with these things is, you don't have leverage to stop. On a bike with proper posture, your center of mass is a fair way behind the contact patch of the front wheel and you can brake hard to the point of wheels skidding and not nosedive. Though a front wheel motor hypothetically going from full power to sudden lockup probably would send you over the handlebars.
Someone passed me on an e-scooter with 6" wheels, going at least 40km/h (I was going about 30km/h and the passing speed was significant). Disaster waiting to happen.
I don't ride these but I and many friends ride electric unicycles, EUCs. There's a known safety concern: if you're riding at the maximum supported speed, and you lean forward, you're going to fall forward because the device can not speed up to catch you. Similarly, if you lean back to brake but are leaning too far for how quickly the machine can stop, you will fall backwards. At high speeds this is catastrophic. You can also draw too much power due to things like incline, music, etc. OneWheels would presumably have the same limitation.
EUCs have default warnings at high speeds, but you can disable or change these warnings (making them higher or lower). You also need to monitor your battery health; I wouldn't trust an old battery.
Ultimately the rider determines the risk. I'm the only rider I know that wears a helmet. Many friends or acquaintances have broken their legs badly or been hit by multiple vehicles. I ride slower and safer, generally, but even I've done some minor damage to myself.
I'm inclined to get rid of the EUC in favor of a scooter or ebike. Two points of contact with the ground is so much safer.
My EUC gives a very strong "push back" at maximum speed and learning forward. I think it would take max speed plus leaning forward through push back plus hitting some obstacle like a large pothole to actually induce a nosedive. it's much more difficult on a EUC vs onewheel
My EUC is one of the dinkier ones though, not the high powered fancy ones that cost $2k
This seems like a cheap (or maybe even profitable) recall.
For new models, it’s just a software update (~free) and for old models it’s a $100 credit on a new board which probably doesn’t consume all of the profit on a sale of a board.
Plus this coverage is now a ton of free advertising for a product many forgot about or didn’t know about.
Shouldn’t they have just done this years ago? Am I missing something?
I understand that HN swings US and we don't like editorialising titles, but this one sucks. It's every Onewheel in the US. "Every single Onewheel" has a clearly absolutist meaning, and the title should be edited to reflect, or a [US] at the end at least.
43k car deaths in the US in 2022. 14 million new vehicle sales. That's one death per 325 car sales. Onewheel is one death per 75,000 sales. Significantly safer than cars.
One also wonders how many 3rd party deaths were caused by cars, as opposed to the virtually zero for the foreseeable future from these sorts of devices.
Pretty classic holier than thou commentary from HN, for sure.
First of all, fuck Future Motion on the C&D for REWheel. Also why haven't they still haven't patched the security vulnerability of hardcoded AES key in their devices? REWheel was specifically architected so that it did not share any IP, and they came in and bullied Nish under an archaic clause in the DMCA that's being hotly contested in R2R. The VESC implementation was Whitebox reverse engineered and none of the coders (Mitch, Dado, Nico) ever even looked at any FM binary. All REWheel was trying to do was let users repair their BMS's and re level their boards for aftermarket rails as well as provide safety features so that boards didn't drop users.
Besides this recall, here are all the other issues with their boards:
1) BMS discharge protection shutting off board instead of pushback/buzzer.
2) Wires breaking in cable harness leading to BMS communication drop shutting off board during mid ride (my friends have broken bones on the XR because of this).
3) Pint X Balance cable pinching
4) GT motor connector coming loose during midride leading to board cut off.
5) Lack of locktite in controller box screws and nuts (common for power button nut to come loose and short controller in Pint)
6) Lack of proper waterproofing in controller and battery box (should put silicone sealant around connector ports internally and externally)
7) Water getting into Pint motor connector causing short (should put dielectric grease on all connectors)
8) Underspeced charging connector on Pint PCB for hypercharger leading to arcing and damage.
9) Unknown reproducible GT shutoff over certain bridges on later hardware revisions. My theory is that you swapped out IMU because of chip shortage and didn't validate high pass filters properly. Either that or GT motor connector looseness issue. I can go ride one of my friends GT and make it shutoff right now if I wanted to by riding over certain bridges! It's insane!
10) Underspeced mosfets on controller leading to lack of torque and recovery in nosedive situations. My VESC Pint beats the GT on hill climbs.
11) GT axel weakness leading to breakage.
12) Powder coating on GT rails leading to overheating
13) Lack of proper coolant (like statoraid) in GT Hypercore hub leading to overheating.
14) Reverse polarity on XT-60 connections (this is just evil)
The above design flaws have lead to multiple injuries and broken bones in Future Motion devices that I have mitigated in all of my VESC boards I have built for myself and the people I love and don't want to see get hurt.
OneWheels are great devices. I myself have close to 10K miles on them. I have felt infinitely safer after I started converting my own to VESC boards, removing the discharge path on the BMS (so it couldn't power off the board unexpectedly) and disabling moving faults (so it couldn't drop the user due to a failed footpad). This has been achieved by swapping out both the BMS and ESC to open source, aftermarket solutions.
I live in the middle of the abyss where there is no traffic (or people), but instead rolling fields for miles and miles. If I fall, then I'm falling into dirt and grass.
People ride these things around cities? That's literally crazy! Don't you guys know that cars were invented to keep you safe inside when you crash at 20MPH!?!? Let alone 75MPH. This device has no business being a commuter vehicle in crowded spaces. Bicycles and motorcycles are acceptable because they have big wheels which provide stability via the gyroscopic effect.
That being said, please post links related to freeing the boards of binary blobs: I need a new rural outdoor pastime, and with all this negative press, there's bound to be plenty of vectors on eBay and craigslist soon....this looks super fun.
If you ask me, this is a great device but adapted by the wrong audience. This is supposed to be out there with the off-road, back country BMX and dirt bike crowd -- imagine downhill off-road long boarding.
You know, the crowd who would mock that anybody ever died on one of these going 19MPH, until enlightened they probably cracked their head open on a cement curb.
> they have big wheels which provide stability via the gyroscopic effect
The gyroscopic effect is negligible on a bicycle and it isn’t even what provides stability to it (it’s mostly the front fork and steering geometry). It’s more noticeable on a motorbike at highway speeds, but it still doesn’t act on it in an entirely desirable way.
As if hitting your head in a tree or rocky path can’t kill you. Isn’t “off road” usually a higher bar for say a car or bicycle than using them on the road?
Notably the update they just pushed related to the recall breaks Rewheel and nRF and tries to further lock the board down against users installing their own software.
I suspect this is part of why do many boards ate being bricked by the update.
> All REWheel was trying to do was let users repair their BMS's and re level their boards for aftermarket rails as well as provide safety features so that boards didn't drop users.
I think there's a useful discussion to be had about the reasoning behind things like this. This is definitely going to be a bit of a devil's advocate thing but it brings up a much needed discussion.
One of the often cited reasons for limiting third party access to firmware and repair is that unauthorized repair could potentially compromise the safety, security or reliability of the device (or at least void the certification), and the manufacturer would still have its brand on the product and the user would not blame the third party if something broke, but rather the manufacturer. This was supposedly behind the reasons why Tesla doesn't like repair, because they really didn't want news about battery fires.
Obviously, in this particular case the safety characteristics of the original product, as you note, are terrible to begin with, so any competent third party is more likely to increase the safety than not.
But say, for example, that the OneWheel was designed with a proper engineering process. Say, for example, the ESC and powertrain was held to ASIL-D standards and the battery pack was UL 2271 [the standard for light electric vehicles batteries] certified - both are entirely reasonable standards to expect this equipment to be certified to (ASIL-D is a common standard for things like Power Steering modules in cars, which have to be robust because any failure could result in full lock to lock torque overpowering the driver at highway speed - also a system involving servo control and brushless motors.)
Such a system would involve a very significant design and verification effort to catch edge cases. Things like your wires breaking scenario would need to be analyzed as part of the design - can the design fail in a safe way when certain failures are encountered, up to and including redundancy. Things like waterproofing, as you mention, need to be tested to IP rating standards - probably at the very least IP66 for the whole device given where people use these devices.
> swapped out IMU because of chip shortage and didn't validate high pass filters properly
This wouldn't have been allowed in a certified product. When you change materials or components in a certified product, you have to redo the validation and certification process. Otherwise the certification is worthless.
*Now, given these conditions, would allowing third parties to easily replace components with random ones potentially compromise safety?*
> removing the discharge path on the BMS (so it couldn't power off the board unexpectedly)
This one, for example, IMO, is questionable. I would argue that it does reduce safety, and given the original DRM, this is what they are trying to prevent. Clearly, some level of certification was achieved for the original battery pack (UN38.3, mandatory to transport), and they don't want this modification to happen.
Given the rising dangers of battery fires and explosions, I believe that BMS system integrity has never been more important, as these devices have a MUCH greater risk exposure (24/7 potentially) and to a much greater population (anyone living in a building with at least one of these devices in it). Even big players like the Tesla Megapack have fire problems, and that's with a proper safety management design. Let's say, for example, a MLCC on your ESC fails, cascading into an arc fault involving the PCB, carbonizing and fusing the copper layers together (there are examples of this happening on even lower power designs). Without a discharge path, the battery and the device will now need to convert 1 kWh of power into heat over about 5 minutes. This is going to set the carpet on fire.
Under UL 2271, and actually under all of the UL standards for batteries if I remember correctly, you need to pass all of the safety tests for the battery with one set of safety devices not otherwise certified (i.e. mosfets as opposed to UL rated battery fuses) "faulted", which means that commercial batteries like the Segway Ninebot scooter batteries are usually fitted with multiple layers of MOSFETs and cell protection ICs. Of course in this particular situation, you don't want the battery to cut off too quickly. And thus, this would call for specific and deliberate engineering to design a solution that will protect against both sudden failure and fire.
Looking to the broader system, the VESC system proposed as a replacement for the original controller is likely more robust in actual usage, but I don't personally think it's a direct alternative to a properly designed first party solution. VESC hardware is largely a DIY-grade prototype hardware and software, which, while functional, I don't consider (and they explicitly claim) is not safety critical. I kind of did wish for a while that they would actually attempt to build such a system, because it would have been nice to have an open source solution with a safety-grade lockstep microcontroller, redundant power paths and whatnot, etc, but after spending some time in that community it seems that the thrill of danger is part of their idea of fun, so I'm not holding my breath waiting.
This brings me to I suppose what my actual point is.
I think that in some cases, software locks that attempt to prevent the unsafe modification of certified and safety critical systems are acceptable. I think that instead of disabling functionality, the app should just pop up a warning that the system has been modified. This is what Google does with bootloader unlocking and what Apple does with their "important display/battery/camera message" notifications, or what Samsung does with Knox. I'm not opposed to these types of schemes because the lifespan of a $2000+ device is likely to be very long, and it's important for downstream users to be aware of the modifications that have been done, and for the manufacturer to be able to say "hey, this is modified, the certification is void, it's your problem now" when it inevitably turns into an accident.
I do, on the other hand, believe that it is valuable to allow users to prototype and develop on hardware they own. This is why I propose that the software locks do not disable functionality entirely. I also think that by replacing all, or a significant amount of the internal components of your device, it is no longer a OneWheel, it is your own creation, and as such, the manufacturer should not, and (tbh already cannot) restrict what you do with it. I'm okay with the manufacturer requiring that its trademarks and the certification marks be removed as well.
I think that a robust framework where manufacturers can prove that they are doing what is necessary to make these devices safe is extremely important especially as this is an emerging market. We are already seeing anti-PEV regulation in various markets, with these devices being technically illegal where I'm from, and NYC banning some PEV batteries (?). If these transportation devices are to become popular and accepted and eventually legalized, something has to be done, both from the DIY side (to promote actual and demonstrable safety) and from the manufacturer side (to certify their products and deliver products with a track record of safety). Otherwise, I think eventually the burden on these devices will eventually push them out of the market.
Thank you for your detailed response. I completely agree that certain standards for a safety critical system should be met for when these devices go out of the factory!
Regarding BMS safety, the reason for removing control of the discharge path is that the device should always prioritize the safety of the user while riding. Instead of dropping the user to the pavement, pushback and audio alerts should be done to alert the user that one of the cells is having a voltage issue, or the pack is getting too hot. Bypassing the BMS's discharge does not effect charge protection, which is the main scenario of what would cause the battery to catch on fire and burn your house down.
In fact, Future Motion DISABLED BEING ABLE TO READ INDIVIDUAL CELL VOLTAGES TO MONITOR THE SAFETY OF THE PACK in an effort to restrict 3rd parties from building batteries. Another anti-consumer decision was the GT having 6.5" non-standard rims in an effort to corner the tire after market. Larger rim size is actually bad for riding characteristics and the right move from an engineering perspective would have been to go smaller actually (the float life is working on 5" hubs)
Yes, I get that having a OneWheel catch on fire impacts their brand, but there's multiple other issues with these devices and quite a number of anti-R2R which is not acting in good faith for users safety, and again, the actual dangerous scenarios are when a cell gets over-charged which the BMS is still there for to enforce. :)
Regarding R2R there's people all around the world who ride these devices, and sending the board into their only location in Cali just isn't an appropriate solution. Unfortunately FM has been very strict on enforcing patents (even though they didn't technically invent the self balancing skateboard as there is prior art) and they have created a anti-competitive, anti-consumer market.
I would absolutely love a safer device that meets the safety standards and certifications you mention, and I hope there can be a path forward where I don't have to build these myself. I'm lazy. I don't exactly enjoy this type of work on my board (I'd rather be riding). I do it out of necessity.
I'm somewhat familiar with all of the problems and bugs with these particular OneWheel products and I agree that most of the actions taken by this particular company appear to be profit oriented as opposed to safety oriented.
My original comment was not really aimed directly at defending them but rather just trying to start a discussion about something that I think comes up a lot and to provide what I regard as a slightly unpopular opinion.
> Regarding BMS safety, the reason for removing control of the discharge path is that the device should always prioritize the safety of the user while riding. Instead of dropping the user to the pavement, pushback and audio alerts should be done to alert the user that one of the cells is having a voltage issue, or the pack is getting too hot. Bypassing the BMS's discharge does not effect charge protection, which is the main scenario of what would cause the battery to catch on fire and burn your house down.
Yes, I agree with your assessment that this would be a reasonable order of priorities for a device like this. If you asked me to design a device like this, on the other hand, I would probably have built it with discharge protection, but have a "controller is driving the motor" pin for feedback where the BMS will give an X-second cutoff grace period. IMO, the discharge current should be set such that it doesn't trip at motor stall current, but does trip with a low impedance short at least (in such a failure scenario, the motor would have stopped anyway). Additionally, power to the ESC should definitely be removed when the device is safely powered off. I would personally be okay with it if they did what laptop manufacturers did and set a "permanent fail" flag in the BMS after being operated outside of its design parameters to prevent the battery from being charged again.
The primary safety condition I'd like addressed is the case where a failure in the electronics while the device isn't being used may cause the pack or the electronics to start a fire (e.g. water ingress into device causing shorts, which has caused documented problems before; Apple actually applies potting compound to the BMS PCB in their batteries to supposedly address this case), though I am aware that charging appears to be where a lot of the hazards come from.
> Unfortunately FM has been very strict on enforcing patents (even though they didn't technically invent the self balancing skateboard as there is prior art) and they have created a anti-competitive, anti-consumer market.
To be honest, I think that this is the core of the problem. In a market where competitive products exist, defects are fixed rather quickly because customers can and will choose products without this unfortunate imbalance of power. If you look at the EUC market, there is plenty of innovation that leads to better products year over year - defects happen, but they appear to actually get fixed.
> Regarding R2R there's people all around the world who ride these devices, and sending the board into their only location in Cali just isn't an appropriate solution.
I think overall with this company, there's a good amount of kool-aid going around in the typical Silicon Valley fashion where people think they know everything about how the world and how customers work. If I remember correctly it's a business that started out of what was once someone's passion project and I'd imagine it is emotionally difficult for people to let go of their "children" and accept that the community and the customer base are ultimately going to take the product places they might not have imagined, and that the aftermarket and consumers are ultimately the deciders of where their vision will go. I feel like a lot of what they're doing could potentially just be a last ditch effort to maintain some semblance of ownership and control, but historically, the pioneer of a technology is not often the one that sees it through to maturity.
Oh of course, you even lead with stating that you would like to make some points as devils advocate and I agree with that approach. It's like when you're doing prompt engineering for an LLM. i.e. need to make sure we loud all context into our shared memory so our neural networks can properly evaluate the scenario and make informed statements. It's a collaborative effort. :)
Regarding discharge protection and BMS safety I completely agree with a hybrid approach of discharge protection with a grace period to alert the user if the device is armed. The main issue with battery safety is when the device is left unattended charging, but I do agree that ideally it should be shutoff completely while unattended. However, when riding, I would rather my board start smoking and catch on fire than ditch me going 25mph. Obviously there needs to be a hybrid approach as you describe as the current situation is not optimal.
Yes, the EUC market is a prime example. There aren't actually that many VESC EUC builds because there is so much competition it is not needed.
Regarding "drinking the kool-aid" and "the pioneer of a technology not is not often the one that sees it through to maturity", I feel like a prime example was the Boosted boards.
> I feel like a prime example was the Boosted boards.
I always thought this was more of a business side problem (they tried to expand pretty quick, including making a scooter) than a technical or product execution problem. If I remember correctly, Boosted's products were actually fairly highly regarded - while I've never had one, I had a friend that had the V2 and he seemed to enjoy it quite a lot. They also made a very nice and functional backpack which I wish was still available, honestly.
I think the Boosted products were a little bit ahead of their time. It was only during the pandemic, at least where I'm from, when PEVs really started becoming popular. One thing I really did appreciate about their products was that they appeared to be designed/engineered here and not overseas. Since they left the market, most other alternatives are just OEM products white labelled from overseas, and you tend to see less design elegance and purposeful vision unfortunately.
I honestly think the Onewheel company could have been the spiritual successor to Boosted, but it's sad to see that they haven't continued that tradition of being dedicated to building a good product and providing good support.
So the company is issuing a firmware update with some new warning system. Early adopters where for unstated reasons this is not sufficient/possible are up for a $100 store credit iff they show evidence of disposing of their $1000 board. Destroy your unsafe board and you're up for 5~10% off on a new model!
If I were were one of these people I'd probably be pissed off. A proper replacement or money back should be the only reasonable response.
At this point there's no way this company would ever have me as a potential customer again after seeing their irresponsible handling of this.
> The Onewheel GT, Onewheel Pint X, Onewheel Pint, and Onewheel Plus XR will receive a firmware update that will add a new warning “Haptic Buzz” feedback that riders can feel and hear when the vehicle enters an error state, is low on battery, or is nearing its limits and needs to slow dow
What the ever loving fuck is the "error state". Fucking websites and laptops can have "error states"
Vehicles shouldn't have "error states" or they shouldn't exist.
Also if it buzzes when you go too fast people will deliberately attempt to make it buzz.
I have a rad rover 6. It’s a fat tire electric bike with disc brakes that can go 20mph. When I got on it the first time and hit max speed, I was like this is definitely fast enough for me. A lot of people say you don’t need the fat tire but I’m heavy and I live in Michigan and the roads are crap here. I never ride it without a helmet and the side view mirror but even then I have to be attentive. The boosted boards and one wheels always seemed too dangerous for me.
I owned a first gen Evolve Carbon skateboard back in 2014. That thing was capable of something like 24 mph, but I took it over 10 mph maybe five times total, and every time I did it was brief and nerve-wracking.
In two years of commuting over two miles to work and back on it every day, I'm proud to say I managed to never have to put my hand on the ground. I had to bail a few times -- broke the drive belt once, and hit a few serious pavement gaps and rocks -- but I never went down.
I was convinced the smaller one they were about to release was something I wanted to try.
Height of the communal electric scooter rental phase, I thought this would be a great way to get around downtown where I worked. Paid the deposit and couldn’t wait.
As time went on the excitement wore off because it seemed more dangerous when I would see existing riders going around. I eventually cancelled the pre-order.
Here we are years later and three or four people have died. Just like my instinct told me.
I was just checking events in the Tahoe area and noticed that there’s some national off-road one wheel competition coming to Sky Tavern above Reno in a bit…
>>For early adopters, however, owners can receive a “pro-rated credit of $100 to the purchase of a new board,” according to Mudd. The credit will only be issued after owners confirm that they have disposed of the old model.
You've got to be kidding me. I hope they're hit with a class action forcing them to replace all of the flawed early units or reimburse purchasers at some ammortized rate.
I sold my onewheel pint a few years back only after 200 miles because of a few uncontrollable crashes and nobody believed me that this is a dangerous product.
I warned the next buyer but he still bought it, just like me before crashes.
But I did convince him to join the Onewheel Crash Club Facebook group. For everyone who is interested to know how dangerous this is, check that page out.
I have seen first hand how these things fail , i was riding down a hill with my friend on the on wheel and it just decided to stop flinging him on to stopped bus . If the thing fails there is nothing to hold on to , its either your hands that stop you or your face
I think this is a mandatory software update, no physical devices are moving, and that the article is written misleadingly, even if technically correct.
Or am I the only person that doesn't understand this new definition of "recall"??
I feel Evolve skateboards are next. Remote drop-outs and start/stop issues have been known in community for ages. I miss Boosted - they really cared about rider safety :(
Bicycles fail safe unless a wheel falls off or both brakes fail simultaneously.
Balancing onewheelers - if the control or power system fails, you immediately go down, hard. And since the cruising position is weight shifted forwards, it's 100% nose dive.
That’s how I ride mine. I’ve recently hit a thousand miles, 50/50mix of paved and trails. I’ve had many crashes in that time but have had nothing but a few bruises and scrapes to show for it. I also ripped my pants once which sucked. I liked those pants.
So yea, most of the problems with this board are related to people going faster than they can safely bail.
These things are downright dangerous!! Avoid at all costs.
In at least one way, onewheels are the safer of the electric "board" options - the weight transfer _is_ the throttle. Consider slowing down without shifting your weight forward - immediate face plant. While the one wheel is dangerous, electric boards are even more risky.
I'd expect the number of deaths per e-board owner to be higher than that of the one wheel.
It's basically that they handle failure modes like low battery, using it at the limit of the motors power, etc poorly. Rather than earn the rider they just much then off
They also report on people who die in accidents who weren’t wearing seat belts or when kids aren’t secured in car seats, or when people hop barriers and try to walk across 10 lane highways at night and then get smeared by a semi.
This isn’t some pro-car blame shifting conspiracy to report on how someone died unnecessarily when easy safety measures are available or were bypassed. The car driver can still be at fault for the accident, but the pedestrian/cyclist/one-wheeler/whatever can still assume risk exists when near traffic and take easy and reasonable precautions. I wear a helmet when riding on bike paths away from cars because you can still get bumped or make a mistake or have mechanical failures and fall and die if you hit your head wrong.
I mean, go ahead, wear one, they aren't going to hurt for sure, and probably make a lot of sense at an individual level, but at a macro, systemic level, helmet wearing is not really the answer.
> I mean, go ahead, wear one, they aren't going to hurt for sure
Is "they don't hurt" really the best you'll say in defense of helmets?
Correct me if I'm way off the mark, but from what I understand the argument against mandatory helmet laws goes something like this: Helmets aren't stylish/comfortable/convenient, therefore people don't like to wear them, therefore people are less inclined to bike if doing so would require a helmet, therefore people are more likely to die from being fat or in a car accident.
This argument seems rational to me. It may or may not be correct, the devil is in the numbers, but at the very least there's a rational chain of argument here. Let's suppose that argument is correct, the rational response is to simultaneously oppose mandatory helmet laws and wear a helmet anyway. Helmets break so your skull doesn't, on an individual basis you are safer if you choose to wear a helmet. Helmets aren't designed to solve "macro, systemic" problems with society, they address the problem of you getting your skull cracked open and they do that very effectively. You should be willing to admit that wearing a helmet not only doesn't hurt, it absolutely helps you. If you're not willing to concede that helmets help on an individual level even if systemic social issues remain, that's madness.
I see room for debate over the value of mandatory helmet laws, but there's no rational debate about helmets on an individual level. Biking with a helmet is safer than biking without one.
My favorite people misunderstanding statistics & risk management was 2020 summer many people biking helmetless in unprotected bike lanes while wearing a face mask.
Clearly the risk of catching a viral load outdoors in summer at 20mph is multiple orders of magnitude lower than smashing your head on cement while moving on a city street..
I wore my mask on a bike not because I was trying to avoid covid, though having arrived at my destination I knew I hadn't forgotten it. I wore/wear my mask on my bike because it keeps my face warm.
you can take what you will from the whole thing, but masks were pretty heavily mandated in a lot of areas where bike helmets aren't necessarily.
what I mean to say is that perhaps it wasn't poor risk management, just behavior driven by mandatory obeying of laws and regulations. no one told them that they need to wear a helmet by law, so they didn't.
(please keep in mind that I don't know anything about your local regulations, just sort of talking in ambiguous terms.)
> I see it all the time when cyclists are hit by cars and they want to blame the death on not wearing a helmet instead of the person who actually caused the killing, the driver.
If someone died in a car accident, would you consider it relevant if they were wearing their seatbelt or not?
Can you point to the evidence that a bicyclist being hit by a car benefits from wearing a helmet.
Also, the exact same logic applies when a pedestrian is hit by a car. How many articles do you see where an article about a pedestrian being hit by a car talks about the pedestrian not wearing a helmet.
There is an extremely vocal segment of cylists who argue that actually, a helmet never saved anyone and if there were no cars at all, no cyclist would ever die.
There’s a time and a place for discussing the merits of helmet usage. An article about a recall of 300,000+ devices should have the article be centered around the safety of the device, not about how a company’s negligence would have been fine if the people wore a helmet.
In my eyes, it’s the same as a journalist talking about how a sexual assault victim wouldn’t have been assaulted if they simply hadn’t gotten drunk that night.
The first thought that comes to my mind looking at this device is "these are failure-is-not-an-option situations". There's many ways to fall off a skateboard without dying, and to me it's viscerally obvious, absolutely none of them will ever apply here. You can't recover onto your feet, because these lithium-battery things are like 300% faster than your top sprinting speed. You can't fall onto your arms either, because your inertial speed is faster than your autonomous reflexes. (You learn all about your autonomous reflexes). It's just your face, and skull. This is the first thought that comes to mind: there's no way to bail, 0% chance. It's just completely not-an-option to fail on such a device at cruising speed. And I'm grounded enough to realize, I'm not a person who never fails physical feats. That's not what a human is.