#onewheel

Future Motion, the maker of the Onewheel electric skateboard, is recalling every one of them, including 300,000 Onewheel self-balancing vehicles in the US. Alongside the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the company now seeks to remedy the products after four known death cases — three without a helmet — between 2019 and 2021.

Huh. 75% of deaths occurred without a helmet.

Step up onto a cloud A board not a carpet Ride on the wind And like it Free the mountain goat within Fly shredding dangerous curves Try to bank the cloud again Carv your name in the dirt Surf the sky and a world within

ahem

I've been getting very heavily into onewheeling. Really cool but expensive boardsport where you've got a board with a single big wheel in the middle. It slaps so unimaginably hard.

It's like riding a very responsive skateboard that handles much like a snowboard. Forward/backward is Segway rules, you just lean forward to go forward, and you have to restrain yourself sometimes from leaning all your weight forward and immediately planting the nose in the dirt. Left/right is just leaning while stepping down on the nose of the board, very intuitive.

Original plan was just to get a Onewheel GT for $2k (I am sadly too large to fit comfortably on the smaller/cheaper ones), ride it around for a bit and fulfill my dream since I was 12 of riding a Sonic Riders, "self-propelled-magic-hovering-snowboard" hoverboard, then sell it if it wasn't something I absolutely loved. It's not quite a hoverboard, but is definitely more safe/fun/accurate than the $400 mall hoverboards that were all catching on fire awhile back. I've never really enjoyed just going for walks in the very car-dominated area I live in, but this thing goes 20mph and eats gravel, dirt, grass, really anything without breaking a sweat. I can hop on the road for a stretch before popping up a curb and riding the rest of the way on sidewalk. If there's someone on the sidewalk, I can pass them through the grass with no issues.

So why am I not selling this thing? The sense of complete freedom. Every time I take it out I find new routes to explore, rough roads to ride out. Riding isn't just getting to where you want to be, it's this all-consuming feeling of freedom as you plan your ideal line, dodging potholes and finding that 1-foot strip of grass you'll be able to ride across instead of crashing into a 3-inch curb. And it's in immediate reach, it's easy to start riding and you can ride anywhere, which pleases my ADHD sense of avoiding extra steps.