Gadgetory

so this is a Lexus commercial you might wonder why a car company is using the hoverboard in one of its ads is Lexus planning to make hoverboards now no shock it's just another marketing stunt but the hoverboard you see is very real it's actually levitating and you can totally ride it but is it the transportation of the future probably not so for like the last two decades we've been teased with the existence of functional hoverboards Back to the Future Part two gave us a glimpse of what a hoverboard may look like in the Year 2015 director Robert Zemeckis further fueled our imaginations by claiming that they used real hoverboards in the film and that the only thing stopping these things from being mass-produced was concerned parent groups but that's not true at all they didn't exist last year Funny or Die trolled the internet with Christopher Lloyd Tony Hawk and random celebrities riding a fake hoverboard called the hover which they swore up and down was true and that was also not real so when Lexus released its first hoverboard teaser earlier this summer I along with the rest of the Internet was super skeptical it looked so real but Lexus out of all companies and then we were invited to see the thing in person the whole thing felt a little bit weird in a beach town about 45 minutes away from Barcelona Lexus built an entire skate park or hover Park if you will that acted as a set for its commercial and yeah this park was built just for the hoverboard which does exactly what you think it hovers off the ground like a proper hoverboard but as I'm sure you've guessed there are some big caveats like the track it needs to run on which is crucial to how the thing works at all inside the board are rows of superconductors a special property of these type 2 superconductors is that when they're cooled down to a critical temperature the exhibit properties that alter and manipulate any magnetic field around them therefore the board must be ridden above a highly engineered track that's carefully embedded with magnets strong enough to hold the board and a rider normally the track is hidden under the hover pole the board must be resting upon a portion of that same track when being cooled with liquid nitrogen which essentially programs it to levitate at a certain height after this process is complete the board can be brought over to the park and will hover above the track at roughly the same height about 4 centimeters this technology isn't actually that new it's a process called flux pinning and we've seen people do some fun things with this on a small scale before but now that it's been applied to a hoverboard what's that actually like to ride it's hard it's not as easy as riding a skateboard where all four wheels are on the ground the magnetic track in the ground lines up vertically with the center of the board so it's kind of like you're on a tightrope and if your balance isn't perfectly distributed on this thing you end up scraping the ground with the undersides of the board it took me like 15 minutes just to glide a few feet so yeah no shot I was going to ride around the park like Marty McFly did and Back to the Future Part two luckily though I had the chance to speak with pro skater Ross McGowan the guy featured in the commercial so you've been skating for 15-20 years yeah and how long did it take you to get a master in a sense where you could ride around the track without scraping yeah I mean after that it's been like five six months I've been trying it so even now I can go down in a straight line even some corner that scrapes a bit but you can write yourself it's quick enough so you don't fall off you can feel it under your feet feel that sweet spot yeah yeah just the feeling of some invisible air rail thing is what it feels like to me so riding the hoverboard is very difficult and besides that another major problem with this thing is that it needs to be constantly cooled with liquid nitrogen and when it was as hot as it was outside that day in Spain we got 10 or 15 minutes on the board before it had to be refilled a process itself that takes another 10 or 15 minutes at this point I gotta wonder why this thing even exists the Lexus hoverboard isn't actually a product it's just a special effect in a car commercial it's part of a series Lexus refers to as amazing in motion which has used lots of flashy props before large mechanical puppets dancing through the streets of Madrid light suits flying through Kuala Lumpur and even will.i.am and my voice is being trapped by a laser the difference is that you would never expect to own what is essentially a gigantic Guitar Hero looking level for your car or an LED light suit you sure as hell would want a hoverboard though fortunately there are companies like Hendo that are actually working on levitation technology with ambition beyond marketing but right now Lexus hasn't brought us any closer to being marty mcfly maybe that's just as well considering the insane limitations of the Lexus hoverboard you need lots of money to build a track gallons and gallons of liquid nitrogen on hand and five months of training just to master your balance so the next time a car company promises you a little bit of back to the future style science fiction you might want to limit your expectations and just tell them this why don't you make like a tree and get out of here