How real-life hoverboard makers are looking to take your commute Back to the Future

Can a hoverboard get you to work faster than the tube? Phoebe Luckhurst hops on board
Floating on air: from top left (clockwise), a still from the video released by Lexus for its hoverboard; Michael J Fox in Back to the Future Part II, 1989; a Hendo hoverboard
allstar

Once upon a time, 2015 sounded like an exotic Neverhappeningland — too distant to be anything more than a fuzzy daydream. Then suddenly it was 2015 and instead of a fuzzy daydream it was your very real nightmare. You were old and, furthermore, disappointed. For Back to the Future: Part II had established the fantastical blueprint of what awaited us — self-drying clothes and video glasses and shoes that tied themselves. Lies, all lies, or in the case of the glasses, a big flop (sorry, Google Glass).

But it got one thing right: the hoverboard is go. And really, that was the best bit: self-drying clothes sound a bit gross and self-lacing shoes unnecessary. The hoverboard, on the other hand, could carry you at speed over the groundling plebs towards your destination.

Last week, car manufacturer Lexus released a video showing what looks like a hoverboard. It hovers (tick), under the inspiring banner, “there’s no such thing as impossible — it’s just a matter of figuring out how”. However, the hoverboard vanishes from view before its skater boy can mount it — giving way to the hashtag #LexusHover, spun across a moody sunset. This might not be the future, rather just the present state of marketing.

Michael J. Fox with a hoverboard in Pack to the Future Part II, 1989 (Picture: Allstar/UNIVERSAL)
Allstar Collection/UNIVERSAL

But there are others. Last year on October 21 (a famous date in the movie) American tech start-up Arx Pax shipped out its Hendo hoverboard to the 11 backers who pledged $10,000 to its Kickstarter campaign. It hovers only a few centimetres above the ground using “magnetic levitation technology”.

When the craft is placed over a special surface, then four disc-shaped hover engines set into its base create an opposing magnetic field, which pushes the craft into the air. A promotional video features skateboarding star Tony Hawk, who falls off at the end. In which case, there’s little hope for the rest of us.

There have been hoaxes, too. The HUVr, whose YouTube video went viral last year, turned out to be a prank by comedy website Funny or Die. The video — which also starred Tony Hawk, as well, unexpectedly, as actor Billy Zane — shows a high-tech hoverboard, with its own operating guide and glamorous assistant demonstrating its thrilling journey above the tarmac.

Will the future take you riding high? Back to the Future bet on it, and sometimes truth is even stranger than fiction.

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