Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lupusreal 893 days ago
The small wheels of scooters make them more likely to death wobble. I have personally witnessed it happen literal to the name, the rider cracked his skull because he wasn't wearing a helmet of course.

Bicycles naturally stay upright. You can push one without a rider and it will roll alone until it loses speed. Try the same with a scooter and it will immediately fall.

1 comments

Some scooters are susceptible to death wobble, that's true.

The fact that you can push a bicycle without a rider and it will roll, while most small-wheeled kick-scooters will fall, is not caused by a higher center of mass, but by the geometry of the front wheel, mainly the steering angle, fork offset and trail. Without a rider, a) the center of mass isn't even that different and b) it doesn't really matter how they behave without one, because the rider is part of the system.