These electric shoes help you easily 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.
Electrek’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.
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![Day 1 of the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025 [Gallery]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/07/54629423281_6315c46dff_k.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Today was the official start of racing at the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025! There was a tremendous energy (and heat) on the ground at NCM Motorsports Park as nearly a dozen teams took to the track. Currently, as of writing, Stanford is ranked #1 in the SOV (Single-Occupant Vehicle) class with 68 registered laps. However, the fastest lap so far belongs to UC Berkeley, which clocked a 4:45 on the 3.15-mile track. That’s an average speed of just under 40 mph on nothing but solar energy. Not bad!
In the MOV (Multi-Occupant Vehicle) class, Polytechnique Montréal is narrowly ahead of Appalachian State by just 4 laps. At last year’s formula sun race, Polytechnique Montréal took first place overall in this class, and the team hopes to repeat that success. It’s still too early for prediction though, and anything can happen between now and the final day of racing on Saturday.
Congrats to the teams that made it on track today. We look forward to seeing even more out there tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some shots from today via the event’s wonderful photographer Cora Kennedy.
Stay tuned for more!
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The numbers are in and they are all bad for Tesla fans – the company sold just 5,000 Cybertruck models in Q4 of 2025, and built some 30% more “other” vehicles than it delivered. It just gets worse and worse, on today’s tension-building episode of Quick Charge!
We’ve also got day 1 coverage of the 2025 Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix, reports that the Tesla Optimus program is in chaos after its chief engineer jumps ship, and a look ahead at the fresh new Hyundai IONIQ 2 set to bow early next year, thanks to some battery specs from the Kia EV2.
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Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger, the long-promised EV charging station of the future, with a solar farm and off-grid batteries.
Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid.
While Tesla did add solar and batteries to a few stations, the vast majority of them don’t have their own power system or have only minimal solar canopies.
Back in 2016, I asked Musk about this, and he said that it would now happen as Tesla had the “pieces now in place” with Supercharger V3, Powerpack V2, and SolarCity:
All of these pieces have been in place for years, and Tesla has now discontinued the Powerpack in favor of the Megapack. The Supercharger network is also transitioning to V4 stations.
Yet, solar and battery deployment haven’t accelerated much in the decade since Musk made that comment, but it is finally happening.
Last year, Tesla announced a new project called ‘Oasis’, which consists of a new model Supercharger station with a solar farm and battery storage enabling off-grid operations in Lost Hills, California.
Tesla has now unveiled the project and turned on most of the Supercharger stalls:
The project consists of 168 chargers, with half of them currently operational, making it one of the largest Supercharger stations in the world. However, that’s not even the most notable aspect of it.
The station is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh.
It can be operated off-grid, which is the case right now, according to Tesla.
With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to bring 84 stalls online just in time for the Fourth of July travel weekend. The rest of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this year.
Electrek’s Take
This is awesome. A bit late, but awesome. This is what charging stations should be like: fully powered by renewable energy.
Unfortunately, it will be much harder to open those stations in the future due to legislation that Trump and the Republican Party have just passed, which removes incentives for solar and energy storage, adds taxes on them, and removes incentives to build batteries – all things that have helped Tesla considerably over the last few years.
The US is likely going to have a few tough years for EV adoption and renewable energy deployment.
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