Segway PT.
Segway Inc. · Dean Kamen · Transportation
A self-balancing personal transporter unveiled as a city-redesigning invention, retired as a tourist vehicle.
$0
raised
18 yrs 7 mo
2001–2020
Poor Product-Market Fit
Built for a demand that never showed up
Cities were not redesigned.
TLDR
The Segway PT was introduced in December 2001 after a build-up in which investors and press were told it would change the way cities were built. The engineering delivered: self-balancing, intuitive, genuinely novel.
The market did not. At roughly $5,000, banned from many sidewalks and unwelcome in traffic, it had no clear place to be ridden. Sales landed in the low tens of thousands against projections in the hundreds of thousands per year, and the vehicle settled into guided tours, warehouses, and police patrols. Production of the original PT ended in July 2020.
It is the standard example of a solved engineering problem attached to an unasked question.
Sources & citations