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RYNO Motors at the Cutting Edge of Innovation

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A one-wheeled electric motorcycle that steers like a Segway never could.

RYNO Motors has spent more than a decade chasing an idea that started as a kid’s question. The Portland, Oregon company’s self-balancing microbike leans and steers like a real motorcycle, not a hover-platform, and it’s built to slot into bike lanes, sidewalks and even office elevators without anyone giving it a second look.

• Founder Christopher Hoffmann began developing the RYNO in 2008 after his 13-year-old daughter asked him to build a real-life version of a one-wheeled bike from a video game.
• The production microbike weighs about 160 pounds, measures roughly 28 inches wide, and is electronically capped at 10 mph with a 10-to-15-mile range per charge, despite being mechanically capable of 25+ mph.
• Classified by the CPSC as a personal mobility device rather than a motor vehicle regulated by NHTSA, the RYNO launched pre-orders at an introductory MSRP of $5,295.

From a Video Game Sketch to a Working Prototype

Hoffmann is a mechanical engineer by training, and the RYNO started as a garage obsession rather than a startup pitch deck. His daughter had seen a one-wheeled motorcycle in a video game and asked her father, only half-joking, if he could actually build one. He spent the following years figuring out how to translate that fantasy into a machine that wouldn’t just tip over the moment someone climbed on.

The hard part wasn’t the wheel — it was making a single-tire vehicle behave like a two-wheeled motorcycle instead of a pogo stick. Hoffmann brought in software and PCB engineer Tony Ozrelic to solve that problem, pairing gyroscopic sensors with three-axis accelerometers so the machine could read a rider’s lean angle in real time and respond the way a bike does when you shift your weight into a turn.

Performance and Handling of RYNO

Riders lean forward to accelerate and lean back to brake, with hand controls backing up the body-lean inputs for finer adjustments. In-wheel electric motors drive the single tire directly, and swappable battery packs let owners recharge without waiting around for a wall outlet to finish the job.

Hoffmann’s pitch against the obvious rival, the Segway, comes down to geometry. A Segway rider stands elevated and needs floor space to balance two wheels side by side; a RYNO rider sits at roughly the same eye level as a pedestrian and takes up about the same footprint as someone standing still. That’s the detail Hoffmann leans on when explaining why the RYNO can go from a bike lane straight into a building lobby.

Unlike a Segway, a RYNO rider stays at natural eye level and can roll straight from a bike lane into an office lobby or elevator without taking up any extra room.

Legal Road Usage for RYNO

Because the CPSC — not NHTSA — regulates the RYNO as a personal mobility device, it’s street-legal on sidewalks and bicycle paths in most jurisdictions without a motorcycle license or registration. That regulatory lane is the same one that’s opened the door for other single-person electric vehicles chasing the same short-commute niche, including newer entrants like the Jetson One.

At $5,295 to start, the RYNO isn’t priced like a toy — it sits closer to a premium e-bike or a low-end scooter, which is exactly the shelf Hoffmann is aiming for. The pitch is less about replacing a car and more about replacing the last mile of a commute: parking a block from the office, taking transit partway, then covering the rest on a machine that fits in an elevator.

Hoffmann has spent over a decade refining a machine most people assumed only existed in a video game, and the RYNO’s pre-order list is the proof that the idea moved from garage tinkering to an actual product with an actual price tag. Whether it becomes a common sight in bike lanes depends on whether cities keep treating it the way the CPSC does — as a personal mobility device, not a motorcycle.