The motorized shoes that let you walk 2.5x faster

I know, it sounds like a gimmick. But it’s not – or at least it’s not meant to be. The Moonwalkers are motorized shoes that are designed to help you walk around faster and get where you’re going in less time.

Developed by Shift Robotics, a startup company that was spun out of Carnegie Mellon University, the Moonwalkers claim to be able to increase the average user’s walking speed by around 2.5 times.

To put that into solid numbers, they can boost your walking speed up to 11.2 km/h (7 mph). That’s just about bang on my average speed on long jogging sessions. Imagine walking everywhere around town at running speed, yet without breaking a sweat!

Of course you still have to put in some effort yourself. The shoes don’t turn flat ground into airport-style moving walkways. But as long as you’re walking, the electric shoes are powering your strides to go further, faster.

These aren’t electric skates though; the company makes that quite clear. The whole idea is you still use a normal walking stride. The Moonwalkers strap on over your normal shoes and are even hinged in the middle, similar to the way your toes bend at the ball of your foot, to give a more natural walking motion.

I’m guessing you’ll notice an extra 1.9 kg (4.2 pounds) strapped to each foot, but hopefully the running-speed walkabout makes up for the extra weight on your feet. And as a bonus, it will be like an extra little workout if you think of the Moonwalkers’ additional poundage as 1980s-style ankle weights.

The solution is designed to be as intuitive as possible. As the company explained:

“Thanks to an intuitive AI drivetrain, the shoes adapt to your gait. There’s no new skill to learn or complicated technology to understand. They’re not something you lace up and wobble away on – they’re highly engineered additions to your shoes that you strap on.”

A single charge is said to last for up to 6 miles (10 km). That might not sound like a very long range, especially when we’re used to seeing ranges in dozens of miles from e-bikes, e-scooters and other more traditional micromobility products. But then again, that’s around to 3-4x more distance than the average American walks in a day (as depressing as that is).

The Moonwalker electric shoes actually launched a few months ago on Kickstarter, though we generally shy away from covering crowdfunding campaigns from new startups. After reaching their goal in just two days and raising over US $300,000, Shift Robotics is now selling the speedwalking shoes more traditionally on their website.

But you may not want to be standing (or walking) when I tell you the price. You’ll have to fork over US $1,399 for a set of Moonwalker shoes.

City Dwellers’s Take

Yea, it’s a bit silly and expensive, but the engineer in me appreciates it! While most people would be better served with just putting a bit more wear on the shoes they already have, I could see a solution like this being helpful for folks whose jobs require significant walking each day. Imagine Amazon warehouse workers or postal service employees with a walking route.

I also wonder if this could have something similar to “the e-bike effect” for walking, where e-bikes have been shown to give average folks more exercise than pedal bikes since the added fun factor combined with the reduced effort means they stay out riding for much longer. Perhaps when you’re suddenly walking at 7 mph, you can decide to walk a mile to the grocery store in just 8 minutes instead of driving there in a car.

For the vast majority of people that won’t be buying electric shoes, I think that just trying to get more steps in the day with your normal acoustic shoes is probably the best bet.