A little back up for that last posting:
Jerry in Omaha
Ginger's Next Trick...Forget the scooter. The amazing engine that may eventually power it will be the real breakthrough.
By Paul Saffo, February 2002 Issue
business2.com
After a year of ballyhoo, rumor, and a televised test-drive by Diane Sawyer, Ginger now faces the task of becoming a real product. Ginger, of course, is the gyro-stabilized personal transporter invented by Dean Kamen and his team at Segway. (Ginger is officially called the Segway Human Transporter, or HT, but "Ginger" will likely stick.) Riding Ginger is fun. Serious, giggling fun. Like a first ride on a bicycle, minus the learning curve. On my first test-drive, I was slaloming around potted plants and trying to ditch the Segway handler to head outside and jump curbs.
Ginger has already won the hearts of early-adopters, but Segway is wisely deferring selling the product to consumers. Social acceptance of Ginger depends utterly on giving it a respectable reputation, and that means no hotdogging nerds cutting off drivers and terrifying pedestrians. The first Ginger-fliers to mix with the public will be in uniform: cops and postal carriers. If the public gets to ride the current Ginger at all, it will be at Walt Disney World, surrounded by clean-cut and slightly nervous escorts.
Image-building aside, Ginger is not ready for retail. With 40 pounds of batteries and a projected sticker price of around $3,000, the current models are too expensive, too heavy, and too recharge-dependent to enter the consumer mainstream. (The basic models top out at 12.5 mph and run out of juice after 11 miles, on average.)
No, what might turn Ginger into something truly amazing is a bit of technology Kamen almost certainly has up his sleeve: a special lightweight engine that would deliver nearly 10 times the power of Ginger's current batteries and would run so quietly you probably couldn't hear it. Called a Stirling engine, and conceived nearly two centuries ago in Scotland, it's a kissing cousin of the steam engine. The basic Stirling design relies on an external heat source to compress a gas inside a sealed chamber, driving a piston as the gas alternately heats and cools. While Stirlings cannot deliver quick bursts of power and have proven expensive to develop, they're extremely energy-efficient, virtually silent, and exhaust-free. Kamen -- who filed a Stirling-engine patent application in 1998 -- is likely betting that the engine's time is finally drawing near.
Segway is mum about any plan to develop the Stirling. But obsessions speak louder than words, and Kamen is very publicly obsessed with engines in general and Stirlings in particular. If today's models were the whole story, Ginger would find a quiet niche alongside electric meter-maid carts and propane-powered delivery vans. It just isn't a big enough deal to justify the $100 million Segway has raised, much less explain the extravagant comments from those in the know.
A Stirling-powered Ginger is probably at least three years away, but if Kamen delivers, Ginger will just be the wrapping around the real revolution. Sure, the Stirling could be to a future era of personal gyro-transport what the internal combustion engine was to automobiles. But the potential applications are much wider than that. The world is full of noisy, horribly polluting two-stroke engines running everything from scooters in Malaysia to lawn mowers on Long Island. If Kamen and Segway can produce an energy-efficient, eco-friendly alternative to these two strokes, they can have all the hype they want. |
