Riding the Lexus hoverboard in Spain

So, this is a Lexus commercial. You might be wondering why a car company is using the

hoverboard

in one of their ads. Is Lexus planning to make

hoverboard

s now? No wonder, it's just another marketing gimmick, 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, as for the past two decades, we have been teased with the existence of functional hoverboards. Back to the Future Part 2 gave us an idea of ​​what a hoverboard could look like in the future. 2015 Director of the Year Robert Zemeckis further fueled our imagination by claiming that they used real hoverboards in the movie and that the only thing stopping these things from being mass produced were groups of concerned parents, but that's not true in Absolutely, they did not exist last year.

Funny or Die trolled the internet with Christopher Lloyd, Tony Hawk, and random celebrities

riding

a fake hoverboard called a hoverboard that they swore up and down was true and also wasn't real, so when Lexus released their first hoverboard teaser earlier this summer , me along with the rest of the Internet users were very skeptical, it seemed so real, but Lexus of all companies and then we were invited to see it in person, it all felt a little strange in a coastal town about 45 minutes from Barcelona. Lexus built a complete skate. Park or hover Park, so to speak, acted as a stage for their commercial and yes, this park was built just for the hoverboard, which does exactly what you think: it suspends from the ground like a proper hoverboard, but as I'm sure you will have guessed.

There are some important caveats, such as the track it should run on, which is crucial to how it works. Inside the board are rows of superconductors. A special property of these type 2 superconductors is that when cooled to a critical temperature. They exhibit properties that alter and manipulate any magnetic field around them, therefore the board must be mounted on a highly engineered track that is carefully embedded with magnets strong enough to hold the board and a rider, typically the track is hidden under the floating pole, the board must be resting on a portion of that same track when cooled with liquid nitrogen, which essentially programs it to levitate at a certain height.

After completing this process, the board can be taken to the park and It will float above the runway at approximately the same height. 4 centimeters, this technology is actually not that new, it's a process called flow fixation 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 is it actually like to ride it? ? It's hard. It's not as easy as

riding

a skateboard where all four wheels are on the ground, the magnetic track on the ground aligns vertically with the center of the board so it's like you're on a tightrope and if your balance isn't perfect spread on this thing, you end up scraping the floor with the bottom of the board.

It took me like 15 minutes to slide a few feet, so yeah, no chance. I was going to walk in the park like Marty McFly did and the Back to the Future part. two, luckily I had a chance to talk to pro skater Ross McGowan, the guy in the commercial, so you've been skating for 15 to 20 years, yeah, and how long did it take you to get a master in the sense of power? mount? around the unscratched track, yeah, I mean, after that, it's been like five six months. I've been trying, so even now I can go down in a straight line, even on some curve it's a little scratchy, but you can write it yourself, it's fast enough that you can't fall, you can feel it under your feet, feel that spot sweet yes yes just the feeling of something invisible like an aerial rail is what it feels like to me so riding the hoverboard is very difficult and on top of that another major problem with this thing. is that you have to constantly cool it with liquid nitrogen and when it was as hot as it was outside that day in Spain we had 10 or 15 minutes on the board before it had to be refilled, a process in itself that takes another 10 or 15 minutes.

At this point, I'm wondering why this 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 that Lexus refers to as incredible in motion and that has used many eye-catching accessories before. 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 that seeks a level to your car or an LED light suit, you'd probably want a hoverboard, although fortunately there are companies like Hendo that are actually working on levitation technology with ambitions beyond marketing, but at this point Lexus hasn't gotten us any closer to being Marty McFly , maybe that's the same way, considering the incredible limitations of the Lexus hoverboard, you need a lot of money to build a track, gallons and gallons of liquid nitrogen available, and five months of training just to master your balance, so the Next time a car company will promise you a little. science fiction back to the future style you might want to limit your expectations and just tell them this, why don't you make yourself like a tree and get out of here?