Overview
Holy. Crap. We thought it was a big ol' publicity farce. No way, man. There ain't no Lexus hoverboard, that's just delicious social media bait for the Young People. But nay, Marty McFly's futuristic skateboard is an actual, physical thing, really made by Lexus and frothed over worldwide.
A concept made famous by Robert Zemeckis’s 1989 Back to the Future II, the 'Slide' hoverboard has been realised by the Lexus team. Lexus first put out teasers for the hoverboard back on June 23, making everyone angry they’d even get our hopes up like that. But today, August 5, they've released their model 'publicly' — although you can only skate at their custom-built skate park in Barcelona. Yep, there's the switch.
This isn't the first time hoverboards have been bandied about in reality. The Hendo Hoverboard's Kickstarter campaign promised to send out $10,000 hoverboards this spring.
How did Lexus make it work? According to CNET, lots and lots of magnets. Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, involving supercooled superconductors, but essentially, magnets. Lexus have built this anti-gravity device into a deck (this was the tricky part, finding a way to cheaply make such a seriously epic device teeny), so you can skim across water without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, you can't buy one yet. And when you finally can, you'll only be able to skate at Lexus's custom-built Barcelona skate park. But we're hopeful.
Watch pro skateboarder Ross McGouran spin some McFly moves on the Lexus hoverboard here, with all the sexy, sexy liquid nitrogen you could ask for.
