Video: Carving through crowds on real-life RocketSkates

By Caleb Denison Published April 24, 2023

Rocket skates have been the stuff of childhood fantasy ever since Wile E. Coyote first strapped a pair of miniature Acme rockets on an old pair of roller skates as part of a harebrained scheme devised to capture The Road Runner (which, of course, never happened). That Saturday morning cartoon originally aired in 1952, and now, some 62 years later, RocketSkates are finally a real thing. Well, sort of.

Naturally, strapping rockets to your ankles (or any other body part) is sure to be a spectacularly bad idea. Thankfully, Los Angeles-based entrepreneur, Peter Treadway, was clever enough to realize that with his own take on RocketSkates. As it turns out, modern-day technology makes the use of ballistic missiles as a means for bi-pedal mobility completely unnecessary. Armed with brushless DC motors, lithium-ion batteries, and microchips, Treadway set about developing what we now know as the RocketSkates, a product which made its debut as a Kickstarter project that wound up being wildly successful.

Seen in the video above, Treadway shows the RocketSkates in action as he skillfully snakes through event-goers at the Luxury Technology Show. He makes it look easy, but you can tell some practice will be needed by first-time users.

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In addition to travelling up to 12 mph, the RocketSkates can connect to smartphones to track travel, and play games or simply meet up with other RocketSkaters.

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Emerging Tech

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Computing

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A healthy few have already appeared on rival AI products such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alongside much smaller players like Perplexity and browser-maker Opera. However, two products that have found some vocal fan-following with Gemini and ChatGPT have finally landed on the Copilot platform.

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The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
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It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
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