Welcome to MIT Technology Review’s second annual list of top tech flops. Without further preamble, here are the technologies we thought did the least for humanity in 2015.
Hoverboards
It was the hot 2015 gift item that went up in flames. Literally. Hoverboards, the two-wheeled, self-balancing scooters, are like Segways without the handle, packed with a circuit board and two AC motors inside the wheels. A rider balances thanks to a phenomenon called the “inverted pendulum.” The problem: shoddy lithium-ion batteries in some hoverboards have caught fire. As quickly as the fad took off, popular hoverboards were pulled by Amazon and banned by airlines as a threat. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said in December that it is “actively investigating hoverboard-related fires across the country,” as well as dozens of reports from ERs of “concussions, fractures, contusions/abrasions, and internal organ injuries.”
