The Curious Case of the Segway: A Visionary’s Ride to Reality (and Back Down Again)

Like many kids, when Dean Kamen was young, he did not enjoy making his bed each morning. Unlike most, he decided to do something about it. At just five or six years old, he devised a system of pulleys so that he could roll out of bed, pull on a few ropes, and have his bed made.

It was the first in a long line of inventions. Kamen was particularly successful in the medical field, where he developed the first drug infusion pump and the all-terrain electric wheelchair iBOT.

He is most famous, though, for the Segway. 

The Segway was brought to market in 2001 to sky-high expectations. Kamen once said, “Segway will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.” Steve Jobs said it would be as big as the PC. John Doerr, a venture capitalist who had previously invested in both Google and Amazon, said it would be the fastest company to reach $1 billion in revenue.

Kamen believed that within a year of releasing the Segway, he would sell 10,000 a week. He was off by several orders of magnitude. In 2020, when production of Segways ended, only 140,000 units had been sold. That’s fewer than 10,000 a year.

The Segway seemed to have everything going for it: a brilliant inventor with proven success, groundbreaking tech, tens of millions in funding, and nationwide press coverage. So what went wrong? 

A Clunky, Expensive Solution to a Good Problem

The Segway was meant to be the ultimate solution to urban mobility, a response to a well-known problem in public transportation: the “last mile” gap. You take a bus or a train, but it doesn’t drop you off right at your destination. You must walk that last “gap” from the bus stop or train station to your destination, which deters many from using public transportation, leading to more cars on the road and greater congestion.

Kamen got at least one thing right: the “last mile” gap was a good problem to solve. Fixing this problem would improve people’s lives, so much so that people would be willing to shill over their hard-earned dollars (to a point). Unfortunately, a good problem does not guarantee a good solution. Several issues plagued the Segway:

• Cost: The Segway came with a hefty $5,000 price tag (which later rose up to $10,000 for some models). At the time, you could buy a reliable used car for that amount. While people were willing to pay for a solution to the “last mile” gap, $5,000 was simply too much.
• Practicality: The Segway came with some cool, sci-fi-esque features, like gyroscopic self-balancing (which contributed to the high cost), but on a practical level, it fell short. It could manage only about ten miles per charge. It was also heavy, weighing in at more than eighty pounds—so good luck trying to lug it up or down stairs! Beyond that, it was just a bit awkward to use, feeling tippy and clunky.
• Lack of needed infrastructure and regulation issues: Today dedicated bike lanes are common, but back in 2001 they were a rarity. So where exactly was one supposed to ride a Segway? It was too dangerous to ride on the road with cars, but sidewalks were often too crowded with pedestrians. There was nowhere for it to go. Compounding the problem, many cities were slow to establish the needed laws and regulations to allow widespread use. Many banned Segways outright.
• PR disasters: The Segway captured the public’s imagination before it was ever released, and that kind of attention can be a double-edged sword. The greater the hype, the harder the fall—in this case, literally. Several high-profile accidents damaged the Segway’s reputation, most notably a fall by then President George W. Bush and, tragically, one that led to the death of the company’s then owner Jimi Heselden. Simultaneously, popular media latched on to the Segway as a tool for comedy (as in Paul Blart: Mall Cop). The Segway was no longer cool, and with that, the final nails were hammered into the coffin. 

In many ways, the future Kamen envisioned now exists today. E-scooters and e-bikes have become popular, helping to close that “last mile” gap. They’ve succeeded for all the same reasons the Segway failed. They are more affordable than the Segway was, particularly with the rise of shared-use models that allow users to rent them. They’re also more compact and lightweight, making them more mobile and practical. There are also more bike lanes now, and cities have had a chance to figure out regulations. And where the Segway was uncool, e-scooters and e-bikes are familiar, a natural extension of manual scooters and bikes. 

Ultimately, Kamen’s core idea was correct. The market was just waiting for a simpler, more affordable, and less conspicuous solution. 

Don’t Go It Alone

There’s actually one more mistake Kamen made that led to the Segway’s failure. This was the greatest mistake of all, the one that preceded—and arguably caused—all of the subsequent issues. He chose to go it alone. 

With Kamen’s previous innovations, he partnered with healthcare giants. He was able to focus on developing the tech while others handled the operational details. He simply was not prepared for the challenges of doing it all himself. As he later reflected, "I wouldn’t have predicted the mountain would be so big and that there would be so many hills to cross to get to the top."

The Segway is a stark reminder that a truly transformative innovation isn’t just about groundbreaking technology but a dozen other factors and circumstances all influencing one another. So while you may be able to invent alone, you can’t innovate alone. 

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