Why was the Segway famous before anyone had seen it?
Dean Kamen had credibility long before the machine had a name. His company DEKA Research built the iBOT, a powered wheelchair that climbed stairs and balanced on two wheels, which is the same physics problem the Segway later solved for a standing rider.
In January 2001 a leaked book proposal about Kamen's secret project, code-named Ginger, reached the press along with the predictions of investors who had already seen it. The venture capitalist John Doerr was reported to expect the company to reach a billion dollars in sales faster than any business in history. Kamen told Time in December 2001 that his invention would be to the car what the car had been to the horse and buggy.
Nobody outside the project knew what Ginger actually was. Guesses ran from a hovering scooter to a Stirling engine. The secrecy did more marketing than any campaign could have, in the same way the hype cycle later inflated the Apple Newton before anyone had held one.
The reveal came on ABC's Good Morning America on December 3, 2001: two wheels, a platform, a handlebar, and a set of gyroscopes and tilt sensors that kept the rider upright. The engineering worked exactly as promised. Everything that went wrong went wrong somewhere else.
What did a Segway cost, and how many people bought one?
Consumer sales opened on November 18, 2002 at $4,950, as CNN reported that week. That was used-car money in 2002, spent on a standing platform that topped out at about walking pace times three.
The clearest record of how few sold early is a government document. In September 2003 the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a voluntary recall covering roughly 6,000 Segway HT units, every one sold from March 2002 through September 2003. The notice explained that machines "being operated with low battery power may not have enough power to remain upright, causing the rider to fall," and listed three reported falls, one of them a head injury that needed stitches.
Six thousand machines in 19 months is not a transport revolution. It is a niche, and the niche that formed was institutional rather than personal: police departments, airport security, warehouse floors, and above all city tour operators, who could charge tourists by the hour and amortize a $4,950 machine across hundreds of riders.
The recall itself was cheap to fix, a free software upgrade. The reputational damage was not. A device whose entire promise was that it would keep you upright had shipped a version that sometimes did not.
Why did cities keep Segways off the sidewalk?
Segway lobbied state legislatures hard and won: by the end of 2002, 33 states including California had passed laws letting the machines onto sidewalks. Then California let each city decide for itself, and San Francisco decided no. Supervisors voted 8 to 2 in December 2002 to bar Segways from sidewalks and bike paths, more than a month before the public could even buy one.
The objection was arithmetic. The machine weighed 69 pounds and traveled at up to 12.5 mph, roughly three times the speed of a walking pedestrian, on surfaces designed for walking pedestrians. It was too fast for the sidewalk and too slow and too strange for the road, and bicycle regulations had been written for something with pedals.
By 2006 Time counted 44 states that allowed personal transporters on sidewalks, and it still did not matter, because the cities with the density that would have justified the machine were the cities most likely to say no. Kamen, who chaired Segway's board, told the magazine that year: "We didn't realize that although technology moves very quickly, people's mind-set changes very slowly."
The devices that later filled the same gap succeeded partly by being cheaper and less conspicuous, from shared electric scooters to the wheeled sneakers sold as Heelys. None of them asked a rider to spend five thousand dollars to look unusual in public.
How did a Beijing scooter maker end up with Segway?
Kamen and Segway's investors sold the company in December 2009 to Jimi Heselden, a British businessman who had made a fortune at Hesco Bastion building the blast-protection barriers used by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He believed in the product and rode one around his North Yorkshire estate.
On September 26, 2010, Heselden, aged 62, was found dead in the River Wharfe near Boston Spa along with a Segway, after a fall of about 30 feet from a cliff path. Police treated it as an accident. For a company already fighting a comedy reputation, the owner dying on the product was the story that stuck.
The last handover was the one that mattered commercially. In April 2015, Ninebot, a Beijing startup that built cheaper self-balancing scooters and had been fighting Segway over patents, bought Segway outright, backed by roughly $80 million from investors including Xiaomi and Sequoia Capital. A company founded in 2012 had absorbed the brand that invented the category.
Ninebot had no interest in relaunching a $4,950 flagship. It wanted the patents, the trademark and the American distribution, and it wanted to sell volume products at a few hundred dollars each.
Is the Segway still around in 2026?
The brand is very much alive; the original product is not. Segway operates as Segway-Ninebot, headquartered in Beijing and listed on the Shanghai STAR Market under the ticker 689009, and its 2026 catalog runs to kickscooters, e-bikes, go-karts, the Navimow line of robot lawn mowers, and the self-balancing Ninebot S models that are the closest living relatives of the original.
The Personal Transporter ended on July 15, 2020, announced three weeks earlier. By then the PT accounted for about 1.5 percent of the parent company's revenue, and lifetime sales across nearly 19 years came to roughly 140,000 units. Segway president Judy Cai said in a statement in June 2020: "This decision was not made lightly, and while the current global pandemic did impact sales and production, it was not a deciding factor in our decision."
Scale is the part worth sitting with. Segway sold about 140,000 Personal Transporters in 19 years. In March 2025 the company recalled 220,000 Ninebot Max G30P and G30LP kickscooters in a single action, after 68 reports of the folding mechanism failing and 20 injuries including broken bones. One recall in 2026 touches more machines than the entire lifetime output of the product the company is named after.
Nothing new carries the Personal Transporter name, no dealer sells one new, and the only supply is used machines from specialist refurbishers and retired tour fleets. The vision failed the way Google Glass failed, not on engineering but on the question of who would be seen using it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Segway still in business in 2026?
Yes. Segway still operates in 2026 as part of Segway-Ninebot, the Beijing company that acquired it in April 2015 and trades in Shanghai under the ticker 689009. It sells electric kickscooters, e-bikes, go-karts, Navimow robot lawn mowers and the self-balancing Ninebot S range, but it has not built the original Segway Personal Transporter since 2020.
When did Segway stop making the Personal Transporter?
Segway stopped building the Personal Transporter on July 15, 2020, a decision announced in June of that year. About 140,000 Personal Transporters were sold over nearly 19 years, and by 2019 the model represented roughly 1.5 percent of parent company Ninebot's revenue.
How much did a Segway cost when it was new?
The Segway Human Transporter went on sale to American consumers on November 18, 2002 at $4,950. The price never fell far enough to reach a mass market, and a U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recall notice from September 2003 shows only about 6,000 units had been sold in the first 19 months.