I never understood why these self-balancing toys are so underpowered. I want to see one built on top of a dirtbike engine that you need to wear serious body armour to use.
What you're looking for is an EUC, Electric Unicycle. Most of the people in the local onewheel group I'm a member of that ride EUC's wear full motorcycle protection. At least one of them can go upwards of 45 mph.
I am sure that man has many hours of safe riding. It is always the 10 seconds of deadly and uncontrollable trauma that necessitates safety gear. Self-confidence is often the hubris of humanity.
I ride a OneWheel and it can test your nerves sometimes. However, just looking at the speed and stance of a EUC makes me more nervous. You could just open your arms at 45mph and embrace the car in front of you.
There are a lot of practical problems trying to build a balancing vehicle around an internal combustion engine.
They can't produce any torque at zero speed, they can't smoothly reverse direction, they likely can't produce enough negative torque at higher speeds, and their control bandwidth is probably inadequate for anyone but an extremely skilled rider.
Well, they already have a reputation as pretty risky to ride[1]. I am sure you could scale the motor and wheel up some, but I'd want some wearable airbags...
There is broad consensus that the One Wheel could do more to warn riders of an impending nose dive.
For example, an audible tone the moment it shuts off the motor while underway.
There are other design changes that could reduce the danger of a nose dive that 3rd party manufacturers have pounced on including small wheels that allow the product to potentially slow instead of come to a dead stop when an edge hits the ground.
I don’t know what product liability is for continuous mounting evidence that an existing design is lacking obvious safety feature and choosing not to make changes or acknowledge this.
But I suspect ultimately this will end in a class action suit.
I rode 100 miles on one two years ago, and planned to take it to the Burn but after my second fall I decided to sell it and get a Space Horse from All City.
I was padded up for both falls but still sustained a sprain to an ankle and some pretty mean scrapes to my shoulder and arm.
My worst fall was due to the motor cutting out on a moderate acceleration uphill climb from stop. This is not unusual on the OW but is normally associated with a lower battery level.
I was pretty good with it, but in the end I could justify the potential for falls once every 100 miles, let alone 50.
I put about 2400 miles on mine. You fall a few times in your first 100-200 miles but after that it really doesn't happen much, and normally only when you do something stupid.
I don't think the go-kart wheel in the middle of a skateboard layout would make for a good ride above ~35mph. Too twitchy in yaw and too limited in braking power by the geometry of the thing.
It's for legal reasons in a lot of places. Most places have laws about the max speed of motor powered devices. It's normally around twenty.
I've gone up to 24 MPH (on flat) when I had one, and have hit the ground going twenty. I'm honestly not sure more speed is a good idea as it just takes one little crack in the road you weren't anticipating to throw you balance off.
Single wheel vehicles have no brakes worthy of the name.
After all, when you brake hard with a car or motorbike or bicycle, it's the front wheel, well in front of the centre of mass, that does almost all the work.
In a single wheel vehicle, the wheel well in front of the centre of mass.... isn't there. In a unicycle that means you're flying off the front (it's even worse in a monowheel) so you'd better not be going faster than a man can run.
... which is why you lean back on these to brake, to shift your center of mass back so the wheel can slow you down. same thing in reverse for accelerating, otherwise you'd see people fall off non-stop at the beginning for the same reason you claim they can't stop.
your stopping speed is limited by how fast it can decelerate you, which is essentially the same as how fast it can accelerate you. it's not super fast to stop, to be fair, but neither is a bicycle going at high speed (though I'd expect the bike to be a little bit quicker to stop).
My issue with EUCs is the complete lack of options in the case of power cutting for any reason, whether it be overheating or low battery charge or a resistor burning out.
Leaning back is not an option once the motor stops pushing the wheel towards you - it’ll roll and then tumble to a stop much more quickly than air resistance slows you down, so you’ll fly off the front.
I’d like for there to be a magic solution to this problem since the size of an EUC is very attractive. Rolling to a safe stop on my electric scooter is preferable in the meantime.
yeah, an instant loss in acceleration would certainly make you eat pavement in many cases. definitely a fair concern. I might claim that "I hit a rock slightly larger than that small rock I can usually roll over and now I'm in an impromptu pole-vault competition" is a more common issue with small scooter wheels than random power losses, but there's more personal control over that. (personally: crossing train tracks were my #1 fear and #1 fall cause on scooters)
either way, safety gear safety gear safety gear. especially since basically all these electric personal mobility enhancing whatsits are horrifyingly injury-prone compared to anything the size of a bike or larger.
If you need to stop super fast you lean back so hard you're actually dragging the tail. There's a reason a lot of people put additional plastic armor on the bottom of these things.