Word: scootering
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Code-named Ginger, the Segway Human Transporter is the world’s first self-balancing scooter and allows a person to travel about 12 miles per hour. The scooter can run up to 15 miles on a single electric charge; to steer a Segway, a rider simply needs to shift their body weight and the machine will sense the change and respond almost instantaneously...
...heartbeat, hundreds of stories full of fevered theorizing gushed forth in the press. Ginger was a hydrogen-powered hovercraft. Or a magnetic antigravity device. Or, closer to the mark, a souped-up scooter. Even the reprobates at South Park got into the act, spoofing Ginger in a recent episode--the details of which, sadly, are unprintable in a family magazine...
...worth of juice. Also a cluster of aviation-grade gyros, an accelerometer, a bevy of sensors, two batteries and software so sophisticated it puts Microsoft to shame. If Kamen gets irked when the IBOT is called a wheelchair, imagine his pique when--if--the Segway is called a scooter...
...sidewalk issue is dicier. In order to ensure that Segways are permitted to move alongside pedestrians, Kamen's regulatory-affairs mavens will have to keep the machine from being classified either as a motor vehicle or as a scooter. At the federal level, the deal is done--though, for a while, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration wanted to classify the Segway as a "powered industrial truck." Technically, final sidewalk authority rests with state and local governments. Kamen is betting, however, that the decision will be made not by lawmakers but "de facto, by what becomes standard practice...
...reaction to it may boil down to five lethal words: Is that all it is? And that possibility is only enhanced by the fact that to many eyes giving the photos only a cursory glance, a Segway doesn't look like a revolution. It looks...well, sorta like a scooter...