Posts Tagged ‘ Segway ’

Segway Company Owner Dead, by Segway

September 27th, 2010. By AbiK

Ok, this one is rife with irony. The type I don’t like writing about. It seems that Jimi Heselden, the man who only recently bought the Segway scooter company—you know, those odd-looking stand-on motorized scooters that look a bit like a pogo stick on wheels—has died. And here’s the eerily ironic part: as a result of driving his Segway scooter over a cliff and into a river.

Now, the cliff was not the great White Cliffs of Dover (approx. 350 ft. high), but a smaller “cliff” that’s located near Jimi Heselden’s estate at West Yorkshire in Boston Spa—for those of you who are wondering where that is, it’s about a three-and-a-half hour ride north of London in the English countryside. And it’s reported at dailymail.co.uk that the drop was about thirty feet from a rocky path–the picture shown there looks more sloping and wooded in nature than a sheer drop. I bring up the nature of the nature (ie, the cliff) not to diminish the severity of the fall, but to draw attention to the fact that a Segway may not be the best vehicle for handling rougher terrain–and clearly there are risks involved in riding a Segway.

The Segway scooter is driven standing up; the driver leans to control the direction it’s going in. And a gyroscope mechanism keeps the scooter upright. The video above gives a sense of not only the contraption itself, but how it must feel to drive one (I haven’t; I also have no desire to).

So according to reports thus far, it hasn’t yet been determined whether Heselden’s death-by-Segway was actually due to a defective Segway, or due to driver error.

Either way, what is known, is that Jimi Heselden was quite a philanthropist who will be missed by many. According to the dailymail, Heselden had given £23 million (over $36 million) to a charity foundation—the Leeds Community Foundation—he set up in 2008. “The organisation helps disadvantaged youngsters, vulnerable elderly people and health improvement projects in the south and east of the city.”

Tags: Jimi Heselden, Segway, Segway death
Posted in Accidents, Defective Products, Emerging Issues | No Comments »