Sinclair's Answer To The Segway

slumos writes "BBC News Online is reporting on Sir Clive Sinclair's reaction to the Segway. The British inventor thinks it's fine for factories, but not for crowded streets, and he's even planning some competition in the form of a top-secret follow-up to the Sinclair C5."

Comments

Interresting to see the difference

[Anonymous MadCoe]

Between British and US engineering.
Styles are different and I wonder what the differences would be.

Re:Interresting to see the difference

[BobTheLawyer]

it won't be British engineering, it will be Sinclair's engineering, which is always made of cheap standard parts rather than the expensive custom-designed bits and bobs that make up the Segway.

So it will be cheap, but made of plastic and probably won't work very well.

Re:Interresting to see the difference

[g_attrill]

When it was made, the C5 made some breakthroughs - for instance the body was the largest injection moudling ever and designed by Lotus.

Oh what a surprise...

[boomgopher]

Well, this is some another company bashing it's competition - ooh, what big news.

But while we're on the topic of the Segway: Frankly, I'm surprised at all the negative reaction to the Segway, here (Slashdot) and elsewhere. I mean honestly, it's very innovative, compact, somewhat cheap, enviro-safe, etc. It could really compete with the automobile in many areas. And yet you get the mommy-types bitching about it promoting laziness, dangerous on sidewalks, etc. So nay-sayers, correct my misunderstanding: how exactly will the world be worse if Segways become massively popular? I see nothing but good coming from its adoption.

Re:Oh what a surprise...

[Mathew Lankard]

I think the bashing stems to the fact that the Segway was made out to be some marvel of modern technology that was supposed to change the way the world moved around. This was according the the hype from the creators and the press. Do we have this marvelous creation? No. Do we have something that Bush can ride around on and look like a bigger idiot? Yes.

Re:Oh what a surprise...

[paiute]

But while we're on the topic of the Segway: Frankly, I'm surprised at all the negative reaction to the Segway, here (Slashdot) and elsewhere

Frankly, I'm surprised that you are surprised. It was hyped like it would be the equivalent of a personal jetcar. It turns out to be a powered walker. Great and imaginitive engineering, but it still is only a powered walker.

I'm willing to let Grandma use it to get to the store from her assisted living apartment, but I don't want to share the sidewalk with obese Segway-riding bozos who should be walking - and are perfectly capable of walking.

Re:Oh what a surprise...

[babbage]

Don't you know your Public Enemy songs? Tut tut...

Don't!
Don't -- don't!
Don't -- don't!
Don't, don't believe the hype!

Flava Flav was right: the hype for anything is almost always wrong, and the bigger it is, the bigger the letdown.

That doesn't mean that the Segway itself isn't a great idea, or that the idle predictions that the widespread adoption of such a machine could reshape the way cities are built.

Look at what another commenter noted about the bike city in Holland, for example. I've been to Amsterdam, and even there the city has evolved into a place where multiple forms of transportation co-exist. Many of the major streets are 100 feet across, with multiple channels for different modes of transportation. The widest streets were laid out something like this (arrows indicate direction that traffic is permitted to flow, which may or may not be bidirectional):

<--- wide brick sidewalk (perhaps 15 feet or 5 meters wide) --->
<--- tarmac bike lane (2m) --->
<--- narrower sidewalk for pedestrians (2 or 3m) --->
X--- barricades to protect slower moving traffic (1m) ---X
<--- space for parallel parked cars (3m) <---

<--- a lane or two for cars & trucks to travel (3-6m) <---
<--- a set of rails for streetcars / trolleys (3m) <---

<--- narrow sidewalk for crossing, train platforms etc (2m) --->

---> another set of train tracks (3m) --->
---> another lane or two for cars going the other direction (3-6m) --->
---> more space for parallel parking (3m) --->

X--- barricades (1m) ---X;
<--- narrow pedestrian sidewalk (2 or 3m) --->
<--- another bike lane (2m) --->
<--- another wide brick sidewalk (5m) --->

if you add it up, the whole thing ends up taking something like 40 meters, or ~120 feet. (It's been a couple of years since my visit, so the widths are rough estimates, but they seem roughly correct to me -- corrections welcome :-).

Additionally, some streets had wide canals for boats to go back & forth, but most of these streets dropped the rail & bike lanes, and the overall width was generally similar to the non-canal streets. For streets not wide enough for all the lanes above, different lanes would be dropped at random: there's always be sidwwalks, but there might or might not be car lanes, rail tracks, bike lanes, canals, etc.

Also, as an aside, everyone with a bike seemed to be a Pee-Wee Herman fan, which is just fantastic :-)

Anyway, just imagine how much American streets would have to be re-engineered to support such a rich breadth of traffic. If Segways were to catch on in Amsterdam, maybe they could share that bike lane on either side of the street, or that mini sidewalk next to the parked cars could be converted for Segway-only traffic. Either way though, they have the basic framework such that a vehicle like this could find a niche somewhere. That isn't the case in any American city I've been to. If we ever bother to build streets as wide as the ones I saw in Amsterdam, they almost always end up being used for three or four lanes of cars

What's that line about predicting the futur

Sinclair C5

[LizardKing]

When I lived in Oxford, UK one of the members of the local LUG was also a Sinclair C5 fan. He occasionally uses his C5 to travel to work, having kitted it out with two flourescent flags on poles to make the machine a bit more visible. He also does long distance trips for charity once a year - I recall that the last one was an attempt to travel the length of the country. Spares are fairly easy to come by, one good consequence of Sinclair using off the shelf parts. The tyres for instance, are similar to those used on many prams(!).

Chris

What ever happened to the Wafer Chip project?

[Dante_J]

Forget the C5 or C6, and Segway.

Clive Sinclair did have a few sharp ideas and one of them was the the wafer chip project:

"What you have is a wafer of silicon a few inches in diameter and instead of chopping that up and putting all the bits that work into packages and then putting them all together again on a circuit board, you keep them on the wafer. The problem is that you've got to have some system to test for the good areas. Essentially we divide the memory up into blocks about the size of an ordinary chip and put a bit of extra logic on which uses a mathematical algorithm to connect up the good chips and not the bad. If one bit fails you can power-down and reconfigure it so it has an extended lifetime."

This was a genuinely good idea. Reduce the cost of chip manufacture and extend the life of computers by many years. Just replace the odd power supply every 3 or 4 years. The reconfigure of faulty chips could even be done on the fly.

Using this proposed method, Memory & Processor chips aren't just "Good" or "Dead", they can last many years in a very slow state of hardly noticable decay.

Heat is a problem I hear you say for processors? Well if you have 20 of them on one wafer you don't need them to all be P4s.

Intel will probably jump onto this idea when Moore's law starts to flatten out.

Cheap slabs of ram and CPU, that don't fail all at once - yeah!!

What's so wrong with what we HAVE?

[ai2097]

The major problem with Segways is that they don't fit into any of the current transportation channels that are available. They're too big and too fast for sidewalks, but they're too slow for bike lanes or the street.

Personally, I bike to work every day (~3 miles, 1.5 uphill, 1.5 down) with a 3-day hiking pack on my back full of all kinds of crap (~25 lbs on average).

Now, cycling has the same problem as Segways, to some degree; cycles are too slow for the road and too fast for the sidewalks. I usually end up on sidewalks because there are no bike lanes in my commute (or really anywhere in my city) and it's far too dangerous on the road.

Now, where a bike has an advantage over a segway:
- I can get off the bike and pass people at a walk.There's plenty of room for people to pass.
- No charging (no electricity, no gas, just food+water in and CO2/organic waste out)
- Keeps you healthy
- Costs little to buy
- Almost everything on a bike can be fixed with simple tools

Now... why is there even a market for these things? With busses, taxis, personal cars and motorbikes for motorized vehicles? With bikes and, I dunno, feet for personal transport? Why do we need something completely incompatible with all of the useful pavement we already have down?

As for using it to get around malls/ workplaces/ etc... you know all of the signs that say NO (insert whelled device here)? I'm sure that segways are not going to be allowed in these places before bikes are.

Anyhow, my 2c.

Re:What's so wrong with what we HAVE?

[jnik]

Segway stopping distances are comparable to a bicycle.

Not a lot of people know this but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason that the C5 was called the C5 is because Alan Sinclair is a supergeek.

The Sinclair Spectrum used a Z80 processor, and Mr. Sinclair was a hardcore Z80 coder back in the day...

The instruction numbered 0xC5 is PUSH BC.... So it's really Sinclair C5 = Push Bike

I've been impressed with that geekiness since about 1984 :)

Yours
AnonymouSCOward

Argh.. I wonder what how much money the bastards will want to 'clean' my name :)

Re:Followups

[Lars T.]

Or like the SAM Coupe, which was actually sold (yet not made by Sinclair).

(Okay, what's up with using accented chars in Slashdot posts anyway?)