Motorised shoes ready to roll into stores

Tired of walking? An American inventor has designed a pair of motorised shoes. The battery powered high-tech footware called “spnKiX” resemble a cross between a ski boot and a roller skate with oversised wheels and are among the gadgets on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

A user straps the motorised skates on to their shoes and away they go, gliding smoothly along at speeds of up to 10 miles per hour (16 kilometers per hour).

The futuristic shoes are the brainchild of Peter Treadway, a Los Angeles-based industrial designer.

“I’ve been developing some form of wearable transportation since the 1990s but just in the last, say like eight years, I realised the real necessity for it,” says Treadway.

“I was going to lunch one day and couldn’t find a place a park,” he says. “So I thought ‘Why don’t I make something that could get me from home to someplace really close by?

“It’s just turned into this fun kind of product.”

Treadway explained that each shoe has a battery and a motor and they are synchronized to work together as “sort of mirrors of each other.”

The rechargeable battery allows the wearer to go about two to three miles (3-5 kilometers) on a single charge and needs about two to three hours to fully juice up again. A handheld wireless remote controller smaller than a deck of cards controls the speed of shoes. Not everyone finds using the shoes easy to use at first, however, and training wheels are provided to take the pain out of the learning process.

“To achieve some proficiency could take you anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours,” Treadway said, depending on the individual. Source:

Published in The Express Tribune, January 14^th, 2012.