What if you took Segway’s standard self-balancing technology, but you didn’t even have to stand on it?
That’s basically the promise of the new Segway S-Pod, a “vision for the future of mobility” that the company announced at CES 2020. It was supposedly was inspired by the Gyrosphere from Jurassic World, but let’s be real — we just got one step closer to the futuristic lethargy of Wall-E.
From the press release:
The Segway S-Pod is a first-class smart transporting pod for enclosed campuses such as airports, theme parks and malls. It is a safe, self-balancing vehicle that is operated by an intuitive assistive navigation panel. With an adaptive center-of-gravity automatic control system, passengers can easily adjust the speed — up to 24 mph — by handling the knob to change the center of gravity in the pod. The S-Pod spins and rotates by the center smoothly for directional changes. The rider does not need to physically lean forward and back to accelerate or slow down.
I always figured that the Silicon Valley vision of the future would eventually bring us towards personalized robot car pods that are basically just trains with private seating. So at least this is a slight improvement on that?
No word on price yet.
Image via YouTube