Unimpressed Journalist Takes Lexus’s Hoverboard Out for a Float

By adpock - August 10, 2015

Lexus Hoverboard

There’s been A LOT of talk about Lexus’s recent hoverboard escapades. And rightly so, considering the team has turned 25-plus years of dreaming into here-and-now reality.

But, since the world’s been duped by hoverboards before, plenty of that talk has been downright skeptical. Including that of Sam Sheffer, a writer for The Verge. But would Sheffer change his tune after Lexus invited him to test out the goods at their hoverboard park in Cubelles, Spain? Well, as the video below shows, the answer to that is no.

Even though he witnessed the reality of a hovering skateboard in actual use, there are a number of reasons why Sheffer remains unimpressed with Lexus’s feat. Firstly, he seems pretty upset that he doesn’t have the proper skills.

“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,” says Sheffer.

He’s also not impressed with the fact that the board needs to be constantly cooled with liquid nitrogen. Because of this, on the hot day Sheffer rode the hoverboard, he could only do so for 10-15 minutes before having to wait another 15 minutes to refill the board. For the chance to hover above the ground on a skateboard, that doesn’t seem like the longest of waits. Heck, you have to wait that long at Universal Studios Japan just to get on the Back to the Future ride.

Sheffer seems to grasp that the hoverboard is a marketing concept, designed for Lexus’s “Amazing in Motion” campaign, but somehow this is also one of the reasons he’s wondering if the thing should have been produced in the first place. As though a mass-produced hoverboard is the only worthy hoverboard there is. What about just doing something that’s never been done just to show you can?

Mostly though, Sheffer seems upset that the Lexus hoverboard isn’t exactly like the one he saw in Back to the Future 2, one that will allow him to perform high-speed bank turns anywhere he wants. Sorry pal, this isn’t the movies, this is reality. And we can all thank Lexus’s dreaming for making it so.