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.
The recall comes a year after Future Motion took issue with the CPSC’s calls for recall and claimed that it tested and found nothing wrong with the Onewheels. At the time, the company issued a press release in objection to the CPSC and called the agency’s statements “unjustified and alarmist.”
Now Future Motion is moving forward with a voluntary recall it chose not to do almost a year earlier. The company is asking owners to stop using their Onewheels until they take appropriate action. For the newer Onewheel GT, Onewheel Pint X, Onewheel Pint, and Onewheel Plus XR, a software update with a new warning system is the remedy.
For early adopters, however, the CPSC and Future Motion are telling owners to stop using and discard the original Onewheel and Onewheel Plus. We asked Onewheel chief evangelist Jack Mudd in an email how many of the original units are affected, but Mudd refused to answer. Mudd also wouldn’t tell us why the company claimed there were no issues and publicly resisted issuing a recall back in 2022.
Mudd did say that the software update for the other models is rolling out worldwide, not just in the US.
Some crashes occurred due to Onewheel skateboards malfunctioning after being pushed to certain limits. The Onewheel GT, Onewheel Pint X, Onewheel Pint, and Onewheel Plus XR will receive a firmware update that will add a new warning “Haptic Buzz” feedback that riders can feel and hear when the vehicle enters an error state, is low on battery, or is nearing its limits and needs to slow down.
“This update is the culmination of months of work with the CPSC,” reads the company’s recall website. Last November, it called the CPSC’s warning about Onewheels “misleading” but stated it would “work to enhance the CPSC’s understanding of self-balancing vehicle technology and seek to collaborate with the agency to enhance rider safety.”
To install the update, owners must connect their Onewheels to the accompanying app and run a firmware update — the process is fully explained in a new video.
For early adopters, however, owners can receive a “pro-rated credit of $100 to the purchase of a new board,” according to Mudd. The credit will only be issued after owners confirm that they have disposed of the old model.
Alongside Future Motion’s blink on the decision to recall Onewheel, the company shared a new video on YouTube highlighting the new Haptic Buzz feature as well as best practices when riding. “We’ve been working closely with the CPSC for over a year in order to develop this new safety feature,” Mudd says in the video. He adds that ignoring pushback or Haptic Buzz “can result in serious injury or death.” It took engineers a while to whip up Haptic Buzz; perhaps it’s something that would not have been ready in a timely fashion after CPSC’s first whistle last year.
You clearly do not understand how the boards work. The “malfunction” is when the user overcomes the torque available to the motor for self balancing to take place. The user’s center of gravity goes too far forward while moving at too high of a rate of speed and the motor cannot physically produce enough torque to keep itself under the rider and the result is a nose dive.
It’s just physics. There is absolutely zero way to prevent this via engineering. It is inherent and unavoidable. The only thing you can do is not surpass the maximum operating speed at which the motor is no longer able to safely keep the board under the rider. Hence the latest update which adds a physical vibration the user can feel when approaching this limit.
Youre joking right? Install a speed threshold, problem solved. It is no witchcraft, but they probably dont want to invest the research needed or dont see the need.
What you propose is actually witchcraft lol. It’s not nearly that simple. Stick with me here and think about it for a sec. The board is essentially an inverted pendulum. When the user wants to go faster, they shift their center of gravity over the front of the board. The board then must accelerate in order to balance the user. If it doesn’t, the nose dips, hits the ground, and the user falls off.
With that knowledge, think about the mechanics of the board enforcing a speed threshold. If the user is near max capacity of the board and wants to go faster, they lean forward to move their center of gravity over the front. The board, with it’s suggested speed threshold, refuses to go faster. Since it cannot move itself faster to compensate for the center of gravity of the user being in front of the board, the nose will fall and cause a nose dive, the exact problem you’re trying to avoid.
It is quite literally 100% completely impossible to avoid this from happening, whether the motor has a set software speed limit or the user just overcomes the motor’s maximum output. It is physics.
The solution, instead, is to have a warning system to let the user know they are approaching this limit, hence the haptic buzzing feedback in the latest update.
Nosedives happen all the time. The deadly cases are those where it happens at very high speeds or unexpectedly. When you feel the board stops accelerating you have to rebalance, Im not talking about a full stop at X km/h. Of course some buzzing or whatever would assist that, but not letting the user reach dangerously high speedy in the first place would have higher benefit imo. Idiots who want to push the limits will still do if they know they can, with or without haptic feedback.
Again, for the millionth time, there is absolutely no physically possible way to stop a user from going faster.
I dont know how you cant understand the physics behind this, doesnt seem so hard, especially since you seem to think you understood it pretty well. Maybe you just havent even read my comment, its not even worth answering then but here I go in case you just misunderstood. There is a motor accelerating for balance, that same motor can brake. If you stop the wheel from going faster than 15 km/h then it wont. What I think you actually mean is ‘you cant stop the user from trying to go faster by leaning forward’. You cant, but they will know they cant push the limits after a few failed attempts and as long as the limit is low enough the risk of serious injury until then is minimal. Im not trying to avoid stopping the board by nosediving, which I said multiple times but you seem to ignore. What Im suggesting is stopping the board from nosediving at ridiculously high speeds, which is the problem at hand.
Okay.
Okay, fair enough.
So you are suggesting you stop the board by nosediving, but at a low speed? I honestly don’t understand, you’re directly contradicting yourself. If this is indeed what you’re suggesting, then that’s pretty dumb.