Slashdot Mirror
The Chevy Segway Keeps On Rolling (Video)
Back in 2009 G.M. and Segway talked about the P.U.M.A., or Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility vehicle. Now it's the EN-V, which stands for Electric Network Vehicle. G.M. (along with partner Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation) debuted the thing in Shanghai in 2010, then displayed it at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in 2011, and now they're showing it off at auto shows, no doubt hoping to get a lot of buzz going for this two-wheeled wonder, which is supposed to be so loaded with navigation and collision avoidance electronics that you can sleep in it on your way to work. (Please wake us up when we get there, okay?)
And then came the one named Christine...
Could we maybe get a little less talking by the broadcaster and a little more of a look at the damn thing
"So now we can spend money on stupid stuff (like segway clones) that were already proven failures by other companies (Segway)." - GM
No I'm not trolling.
This is my honest opinion.
Though their Volt car seems like a decent idea; not sure why it isn't selling better?
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Nothing like watching GM blow its bailout money on this turd.
They rolled-over a lot and damaged the driver. (Then the company went bankrupt.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Who can sleep in a car seat? Not me, I haven't been able to since I was 3.
Now, the only thing that will motivate me to give up control of my car is if I can darken the windows and have a wank on the way to / from work. I have a 30 minute commute... just about perfect.
In the meantime, I'm going to [try to] enjoy the experience of driving while I still can.
I can see the fnords!
Sarge: May I introduce, our new Light-Reconnaissance vehicle. (Rotating around the new jeep) It has 4-inch Armor Plating; M.A.G. Bumper Suspension; a mounted machine gunner position, and total seating for three. Gentlemen! This is the M12 LRV! I like to call it the 'Warthog'.
Simmons: Why 'Warthog,' Sir?
Sarge: Because 'M12 LRV' is too hard to say in conversation, son.
Grif: No, but, why 'Warthog'? I mean, it doesn't really look like a pig...
Sarge: Say that again?
Grif: I think it looks more like a Puma.
Sarge: What in Sam Hell is a 'Puma'?
Simmons: Uhh, you mean like the shoe company?
Grif: No, like a Puma. It's a big cat, like a lion.
Sarge: You're making that up.
Grif: I'm telling you, it's a real animal!
Sarge: Simmons, I want you to poison Grif's next meal.
Simmons: Yes sir!
Where's the bamboo handles and the skinny guy to make it go?
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Isn't that the woz at 00:37?
But it has nothing to do with pods. It has nothing to do with people. It's all about hurting.
Or if you don't like that.
If this is for "pod people" then who's going to buy it? Pod people got no reason to live.
Trumpy no!
Whet they need is a way to get you to your desk and into your chair without waking you, making the transition form commute to work entirely seamless.
Bicyles and walking through city centers are a thing of the past! Now you can sit everywhere! You can sit at home, you can sit on the commute in to work, you can sit the few blocks you would usually walk from your parking lot to your office or between the office and the local coffee shop, then continue to sit all day in the office! Soon shops will have drive throughs for your ENV and your office building will have special doors and hallways andeven big elevators to allow you to drive right to your cubicle in the office! Viva La Revolution! Sitting is the future!
You'd never believe that they were bankrupt and living off government bailouts. Actually, that's the only thing that could possibly explain the financial death-march of the Volt project and continued research and development on things like this, The introduction of the Volt has led to the amazing discovery that cars need heaters and air conditioners to function outside of perpetually warm climates, Put a heater and air conditioner in an electric car and its range drops to a few miles. So you put in a "seat warmer", and accept the reality that you have created a car that is only marketable in Southern California. They're trying to sell Volts and Leafs in Minnesota and Texas. I live in Chicago and I have never, not even once seen a Volt or Leaf on the road. This car is even worse. How does it perform in 12 inches of blowing snow? How comfortable is that black bubble when it's over 100 degrees out? Why would anyone buy this car who doesn't live in, say, coastal Southern California, where the climate is perpetually mild? Yet GM is pouring ungodly amounts of money into ridiculous crap like this. This is exactly what happens when a company becomes captured by the government and detached from the need to actually make profits. At this rate, they are going to need another bailout very, very soon, because they are sinking their capital into developing and manufacturing products that very few people wants. But the next Republican Congress is not going to give them another bailout, and they are going to be right back in bankruptcy court, reorganizing the company for real, like they should have done before instead of turning it into Barack Obama's personal toy factory.
If asshat politicians and places like Disney didn't overreact and put bans in place on them before they even came out then who knows if they could have been more popular, and more affordable?
While a lot of that early regulation got overturned eventually it seemed like it got bushwacked before it had a chance.
the physics of doing an emergency break with two parallel wheels when going 35 mph?
They were displaying a prototype of this 2 years ago at the NY Auto Show held at the Javits Center... My friend and I are standing by it, and we're trying to guess how much electronics are crammed into the thing, and my friend says "I'll bet it runs Linux"... So the booth babe next to us turns and says 'No, it runs on electricity!"
We thanked her for her insightful information, took three steps and then started laughing hysterically.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Seriously, it looks like a melted portable toilet.
Can't we just have those things from Logan's Run? They looked almost as cool that that network they had where you could hook up for sex (nothing could top that, of course).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The problem of getting a large number of people around in an urban setting was solved more than a hundred years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle
No reliance on fossil fuels. No recharge time. Takes very little parking space. Extremely maneuverable. Easily moved when broken. Cheap. Easy to repair.
It does have one fatal flaw - low profit margins.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Imaging a fleet of these at bus/train stops for daily rental. In the US, at least, the problem with mass trasportation is getting from one stop to the rest of the destination. I tried to start a business in the Dallas area based on this. The idea is basically, a person pays a monthly subscription rental on an small shuttle electric vehicle. The company provides them with a vehicle like the EN-V at the location where they are dropped by the bus. When they are done, they simply return the vehicle to the stop, get on the bus, and go home. Ironically, the Texans that bitch all of the time about federal regulations, wouldn't let me start the business because of state requirements on vehicle size, liability insurance "path to owner" requirements, and licensing restrictions on who can run a "rental car business". If someone has the investment capital, I can guarantee the Federal incentives and tax cuts on this business alone would be worth getting into.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
i would rather just have a golf cart, at least a golf cart has the room to haul four people, or two people and several bags of groceries or luggage or whatever else you need to haul
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Riding around in a dismembered Transformer's head, specifically Bumblebee.
that is more or less what I thought ...
If that is so blatantly obvious that even I can see it, why are they still working on it?
I clicked on the video, expecting to see wacky gadgetry and weird-looking vehicles.
Instead, I got some girl talking (don't they always?) and being generally boring.
and that is what I thought. So who would want to buy a flawed design like this?
All I saw was a no child left behind native speaking very bad english.
At the very end of the video she points out that this model (2nd gen) has no windshield wipers, headlamps, or climate control. But they are looking to add that stuff for the 3rd gen model so it will be "all weather". It seems to me that by the time they add all the crap to it that a normal car has, it won't be any cheaper than buying a SMART car. Sure you can spin it around and park it more easily, but with the range and speed tradeoffs it hardly seems like a good business model.
I'm confused, who is the target market for this thing? They do not have the safety features of existing cars, so they cannot be used on the roads with existing cars. The justification for not including standard safety features is that they will never crash because, when every vehicle on the road is one of these, they will talk to each other and know where all the others are. The question is how do we get from where we are, to the place where every vehicle is one of these? Of course, the government and big businesses would love this because they would be able to track your every move.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Looks like they got their concept from the head of a yellow jacket.
http://levahnbros.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/yellow-jacket.jpg
Because its a fairly new plug-in hybrid that's substantially expensive as many competing hybrids (including, now, plug-in models) from more established brands (e.g., Prius), that is marketed as an "electric car" while at the same time spending a lot of marketing effort to overcome the perception of limitations of electric cars, and that is much more expensive than competitors electric cars (e.g., the Nissan Leaf.)
If they had marketed it as a very fuel efficient hybrid, rather than trying to market it as an electric car and then trying to overcome the public perception of the limitation of electric cars (a limitation that is real, but doesn't apply to the Volt because its a plug-in hybrid, not an electric car) they would have faced less challenges, but they probably saw "electric car" as more of a differentiator, as there were lots of hybrids on the market. While that's probably true, and its probably a positive differentiator for a certain segment of the market, that segment is precisely the segment that is going to be turned off when they find out it actually has a gas tank.
But even then it would be hard sell -- its a very expensive product that most of the intended market would need to finance, that doesn't appeal to the luxury-oriented market, that hit the market during an economic downturn that featured a major credit crunch, and for which the nearest competitors were much less expensive. Its not amazing that it was hard to sell even if the marketing had been spot on.
The name PUMA, it made me think of Red vs Blue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo7QCC2EDtk
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Car manufactures are already working on car to car communication (and car to roadside).
Also, if the government and big business would want to track your vehicles, they already can! We sell the tech for that. It's quite new, but it doesn't even require changes in the current infrastructure as it uses the normal induction loops in the road. It has only a 90-95% detection ratio (less when people are taking corners) but it should be enough to track your habits.
We are using it to track and optimize your travel time. But who knows what till will bring...
Is it me, or is the last word that synthesised voice at the beginning says, "Negroid"?
Put your ego aside for just a moment, my little slashdotters.
I doubt that US, CA, UK, AU, NZ, or other Euro countries are the initial target market for the Chevy Segway.
Have you ever visited high population density cities in China or Taiwan (and Japan to a lesser extent)? If you have, you have also seen the insane scooter deathrace they call normal traffic conditions.
I found this video on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=P19qFzqBKGs/
Now imagine it's raining. A canopy sounds like a good thing.
I have personally witnessed scooters being driven like bumper cars in Taipei. It dawned on me then, that this was the reason scooters are designed with the protected leg space in front of the seat vs. motorcycle style. Additional driver/rider protection of a frame and collision avoidance sound like good things.
At 6'3" 260lbs (1.905m 117.9 kg) for me to consider buying one of these is ludicrous. But it wouldn't stop me from making money by selling them to these folks in Taipei.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sorry, if a vehicle has only two wheels they should be one in front of the other.
If any new form of vehicle is the future it'll be the half-width car, it will probably be a 3-wheeler though.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The justification for not including standard safety features is that they will never crash because, when every vehicle on the road is one of these, they will talk to each other and know where all the others are.
As someone else pointed out, deer, falling rocks, and icebergs tend not to be where expected. "We don't need more lifeboats, she's unsinkable!"
yes .. the video talks about the "never crash" idea and explains that for this reason, there is no bumper or airbag. ... even if these vehicles only operate in totally isolated lanes where no child, dog, or damaged vehicle can ever appear and nothing can ever drop on the driveway, I am not sure if people would want to drive in them given this kind of "safety".
Sounds quite naive to me
"no bumpers and no airbags because it will never bump into anything"
What if something bumps into it? What if the road is slippery? What if the battery is empty and it keels over? Segways are already unsafe, now imagine you're locked inside one.
There's a lot of safety gained by not going fast, and by not being quite such a large target. Despite the widespread belief that bicycles are deadly-unsafe, per-hour (not per-mile) they're about the same as automobiles. One might guess that there is some frequency-of-brain-fart constant at work here.
I think the way we get there is that we start deploying the anti-crash and collision sensor stuff now in ordinary cars, and once those are widespread, then cars can get smaller.
I also think that by the time these are deployed, your every move will be tracked anyway (pattern recognition, ubiquitous cameras, etc) unless legislative steps are taken to stop this from happening. My snap answer would be "ride a bicycle" but that is not a remedy to ubicams.
That's the message I'm getting when I see someone riding one of these "transportation".
Seriously, you believe the products like the Segway and Volt are priced wrong because "the 1% do not understand the 99%"?
I'd say that has practically nothing to do with it. What you've generally got here is the realization that our govt. leaders are pushing for environmentally "greener" solutions to energy-related issues, meaning loads of tax subsidies and loans available to those promising to design and deliver such solutions.
We saw this same thing in the Clinton administration when Bill mandated an electric car be put into production during his term in office. GM responded with the EV-1 electric car, which promptly flopped -- failing so miserably, almost all of the vehicles were buried underground! GM didn't elect to produce the EV-1 because they really believed it would be profitable and successful. They did it because federal govt. hung out the "WANTED!" poster demanding one, and they knew there were political favors to be had and loads of positive P.R. for forging ahead with it.
The people with the money to buy an electric car as an "expensive toy" aren't really a target market for a Chevy Volt either. (Well, there will always be at least a few exceptions to the rule since tastes are so varied ...) In general though? Those "1 percenters" are going to go for something much "cooler" than a car with the Chevy bow-tie on it and with better performance, like the Fisker Karma or the Tesla roadster.
The 1% tend to be people in industries like banking and finance, where they presumably have a pretty good handle on the spending habits of the "rest of us". They may be living in their own fantasy world made possible by their large amount of available spending money, but that doesn't mean they'd make a really boneheaded business decision like trying to sell the public a car that's 2x the max. price many of them can even get the loan approved for. There are other motivations at work here.
I do not think that this is compatible with physics for any speed faster than fast walking: the force from decelerating will be so strong that the vehicle will lean forward. There is no way how a human can counter this by just shifting weight (that force is ridiculously small compared to quickly braking a couple of dozen or even hundred pounds of mass down from 35mph to a stop.
Even if the vehicle could look into the future and would automatically lean back as far as possible before initiating the break, the deceleration forces for anything but a very gentle stop would be too big to not make the vehicle turn around the point where the wheels touche the ground and topple over forward.
Do you think everyone on the planet is supposed to know what Linux is? Grow up.
As I said, I do not doubt that you can brake from the speed of hockey player and I do not doubt that you can brake in a nice gentle decelration. But you cannot do anything close to an emergency brake down from 35 mph.
I would not even need a demonstration to be convinced, just show me the math.
So you don't have to worry about pollution? Where do you think electricity comes from lady.
Lame!
Old!
Played!
I want more single wheel designs.
Motor-unicycles, cars, buses, trucks etc.
Start building them stupid things!
This should revolutionize personal travel the same way the Segway did....very little.
Take public transit. Save yourself the hassle of demonstrating what happens when Humpty Dumpty meets a 1970's Volvo at speed.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Seriously, you believe the products like the Segway and Volt are priced wrong because "the 1% do not understand the 99%"?
Yes. Six grand is nothing to Warren Buffett, it's the price of a decent used automobile for most people. I find it hard to believe there's more than $500 in materials and labor in one, and predict (my predictions are usually wrong) that when the patent runs out you'll see knockoffs for under five hundred bucks.
What you've generally got here is the realization that our govt. leaders are pushing for environmentally "greener" solutions to energy-related issues, meaning loads of tax subsidies and loans available to those promising to design and deliver such solutions.
Then why are the green solutions so damned expensive? They're just taking the government money and running. I'm completely against these subsidies; I'm all for welfare for the poor, but the rich get the lion's share of the handouts. It's disgusting.
The people with the money to buy an electric car as an "expensive toy" aren't really a target market for a Chevy Volt either. (Well, there will always be at least a few exceptions to the rule since tastes are so varied ...) In general though? Those "1 percenters" are going to go for something much "cooler" than a car with the Chevy bow-tie on it and with better performance, like the Fisker Karma or the Tesla roadster.
That's my point exactly. The rich will be buying things like the Tesla, who in their right mind would spend the price of a luxury sedan on an electric Vega? But as to the EV-1, nobody mandated that Chevy make them. Ford didn't make one, that was strictly Chevy's decision.
The 1% tend to be people in industries like banking and finance, where they presumably have a pretty good handle on the spending habits of the "rest of us".
No, the tellers, who ARE part of "the rest of us". They have an idea what our spending habits are. Their bosses don't.
They may be living in their own fantasy world made possible by their large amount of available spending money, but that doesn't mean they'd make a really boneheaded business decision like trying to sell the public a car that's 2x the max. price many of them can even get the loan approved for.
Yet they do. If they realized these decisions were boneheaded they wouldn't make those decisions.
Free Martian Whores!
Well all cars do actually, but the Volt is no more limited than any other vehicle. As long as you can find a gas station, you can keep driving. Yes, the batteries have limited range between charges, but that's how batteries work.
Whether the Volt is more or less practical than any other $40,000 vehicle depends on your criteria.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.