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by city41 1629 days ago
I've never heard of a onewheel randomly conking out. I've ridden one for three years now.

When you are going so fast that the motor is at its brink, the onewheel will raise the nose as a warning. Ignoring this will toss you off the board, maybe that's what people are experiencing?

2 comments

I had 2.2k miles on my Onewheel+ going through urban traffic before someone took it off my hands, so I think I had a decent amount of experience.

Mine cut off semi-randomly a couple dozen times when I was well past the 300 mile mark. The worst/most annoying cases would be when trying to re-engage it when the traffic light would go green, but the onewheel wouldn’t re-engage and it’d just look like I was tripping forward in traffic. I’d have to step over to the curb and restart it a couple times before it ‘worked’

It was definitely the most fun I’ve ever had commuting, but the fact that I couldn’t trust it to simply just not shut off on me in traffic made it feel pretty impractical.

Apparently a couple causes for this could have been a bad battery and also a bad footpad. For now, I’m just sticking with my ebike, since a battery failure there is a bit less catastrophic!

I did the same, both in distance and the switching to ebike. I realized that I didn't want to end up in the hospital and I was at a much higher chance riding it then not. I had moved and the roads were a higher speed limit, and not smooth at all. A bad combinations.

I'd say in the active group of people there were maybe 2 that this happened to, out of maybe 10-20.

Huh, interesting. What model was it? My pint has been rock solid through 2k miles.
Onewheel+. The version before the XR. Definitely not claiming the issues I had were common at all. But experiencing the failure cases firsthand definitely just put me off from feeling comfortable riding the board long-term. It was definitely a fun year when I had it.
> I've never heard of a onewheel randomly conking out.

Well, now you have. I ride OneWheels and one of mine (all stock except tire) has developed an issue where it does randomly nose dive, even at medium speeds (10-14mph). I'm logged about 2k miles and I'm well aware of when the board can nose dive due to pushing too hard up a hill or into a headwind. I've had 4x nose dives on that board (specifically in the last dozen rides) that were not caused by any of the standard issues. It seems to be a footpad sensor issue since after the dives, the footpad won't engaged fully without some well targeted "precursive maintenance."

Personally, I think a lot of people ride them way to fast for the amount of gear they wear and their skill falling safely in that gear. I like to ride slower and carve. It's more fun and much harder to break a bone if you know how to fall well.

I ride really slow and just use riding as my time to think about things. I wonder if they've improved the foot sensor issue on later models? I have a pint and I've not heard of any foot sensor issues with pints. That's pretty scary though, yikes.