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.
Loose definition of a recall. Newer models are getting a software update. Older models are told to be thrown in the bin and get $100 credits to buy a new one
For early adopters, however, the CPSC and Future Motion are telling owners to stop using and discard the original Onewheel and Onewheel Plus.
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.
$100!? LMAO, ok. That’ll fix ya right up. And it’s a credit so basically useless unless you buy their crap.
$100 off of a $2000 replacement, the rest of which will have to be done out of pocket. “We’re down with offering a recall, but we had to make sure it lines our C-suite’s pockets first.”
I mean car recalls often don’t have the cars go fully back to the manufacturer, just to a dealer to have the part fixed or firmware updated.
For XR users they are flat out saying not to use your board until the firmware comes out, and for everyone else they’re saying not to use them until you can update the firmware.
Honestly it’s a little shady that the CPSC let them avoid issuing a recall until a firmware update was ready, but it sounds like they would have forced them to fully recall all models if they hadn’t been able to come up with haptic feedback.
Newer models are getting a software update.
That doesn’t exclude it from being a recall though?
Aren’t the early models the only ones that can actually be modified and repaired using consumer available parts? Seems kind of fishy to me that those are the only ones that are being binned.
Onewheel is a garbage, monopolistic company that spits on consumer rights.
Yeah but i love my GT so… also, I dont remember ever seeing any VESC anywhere near as good
I don’t know about garbage, but what actual monopolistic practices have they shown? Haven’t they just cornered that market with a unique and superior product?
Watch Louis Rossman’s videos for more details, but no. Onewheel is extremely litigious and were able to get a patent for the entire design of single wheel vehicles, so they can basically sue anybody for patent infringement just for making any kind of single wheeled vehicle.
It would be like if Ford got a patent for any machine with an engine and four wheels, and could sue any company that tried to create their own car.
They also have spent a ton of effort purposely making their Onewheel boards as tough to repair as possible. The earliest models of boards used a bunch of off the shelf parts and could be swapped, modded, and repaired by regular folks. They started writing their software to purposely brick any new boards detected if plugged in, so users couldn’t buy a battery or motherboard from a broken Onewheel of the same model and use parts from it on to repair their current Onewheel.
They are super anti-consumer, anti-competition, and only are as popular as they are because of these practices. They innovate less and less and instead spend tons of effort making sure nobody else can create a better product. They also don’t want users modding or repairing their products, because they can’t monetize that.
Haven’t electric unicycles been around for way longer though? I remember Vat 19 selling one years ago and one of the meal delivery companies in my city uses them on occasion. Do they have a patent on those too?
Can’t wait to see Rossmann’s video on this one. Especially the part about how their idea of a recall is to tell people to throw away their device and buy a new one.
Edit-- https://youtu.be/Q_Mk-5XkSmY
Four deaths per 300,000 boards? Hoo-boy! Wait until the CPSC hears about cars!
Cars and bikes would be banned if they were invented today.
We are incredibly tolerant of dangers that we are already familiar with.
There’s a lot of things that wouldn’t fly if they were invented today. Like could imagine how controversial libraries would be?
It would be shunned as socialism, and major publishers of books and DVDs would sue whoever came up with the concept into oblivion.
I mean shit look with how much contempt IP holders have against archive.org for trying to make sure nothing becomes lost media
We did ban that, and it didn’t really do much. It just created a black market, much like weed today.
Not sure how not wearing a helmet makes it okay to be killed by a faulty product.
The difference as far as I could tell from the text would be that car accidents are usually the users fault while this is attributed to the products failure or bad usability.
Thanks for that link, very interesting. I didnt cite the 94% though, I didnt even know about that statistic. Also, even if it isnt 94%, its probably close to that. Even if its just half of that, you cant blame the other half directly on the cars malfunction, those accidents are probably caused by many factors. So like I was saying, in this case the fault seems to lie entirely with the product.
It’s definitely not a false equivalency. The death rate per capita is one way you compare how deadly a mode of transportation is.
