It is my understanding that the failure conditions of these boards is present in all competitors as well. For example, if the top speed of the board is exceeded, the motor is no longer sufficiently powerful to keep balance or slow properly. That appears to be an inherent flaw in the technology that could only trivially be addressed with a much more powerful motor. To my understanding, none of the competitors address this problem, and the characteristics between them are all pretty comparable.
It seems to just be this one company that is targeted. Is my understanding of that/the differences between them not accurate?
When reaching certain conditions the one wheel just stops working and launches the rider. The recall is to (on most models) add a warning to the rider when they enter those conditions and generally handle it better. It's a firmware update.
Presumably the others have been handling these conditions better, because they don't have similar numbers of accidents, crashes, and deaths.
The biggest thing that stuck out in my mind was there was several deadly accidents and some of those were with folks who were wearing helmets.
They propose some haptic warning, so presumably those devices lacked any warning at all. I have owned some of similar monocycles and they all at least emitted a sound and had options in settings to prevent you from using full power of the motor for horizontal motion (it basically kicks you back gently once you reach the treshold and that makes you feel like you're about to fall and you lean to the opposite side way before one reaches close to 100% power).
Wouldn't the governor just cause this problem? The speed is determined by the angle of lean, so it's a physical problem. That's why the solution they are using is a haptic notification basically.
