Photos / Supplied
Lexus is a luxury brand that can also take itself a bit too seriously. And then sometimes it makes hoverboards.
Back in 2015, the luxury brand created a fully functional hoverboard as part of a technology project called Slide. In case you’d forgotten, 2015 is also the year that Marty McFly travels to from 1985 in the film Back to the Future Part II, whizzing around on a hoverboard while he’s there. Get it?
While there was skepticism at the time, the Lexus Hoverboard was indeed a real thing. It features two “cryostats”: reservoirs in which superconducting material is kept at -197 degrees through immersion in liquid nitrogen (hence the music-video-style dry ice).
The tricky bit is that it requires a magnetised track to operate. In typically “relentless pursuit” fashion, Lexus went ahead and built a full sized skate park to test and demonstrate it in Cubelles, Barcelona.
Two hundred metres of magnetic track was laid beneath the hoverpark surface.
The magnetic field from the track is effectively “frozen” into the superconductors in the board, maintaining the distance between the board and the track, which keeps the board hovering.
This offers the ability to undertake tricks no conventional skateboard could ever perform, like travelling across water.
Most of the test riding was carried out by pro skateboarder Ross McGouran: “I’ve spent 20 years skateboarding, but without friction it feels like I’ve had to learn a whole new skill, particularly in the stance and balance in order to ride the hoverboard. It’s a whole new experience.”
The final ride footage was released as a film by director Henry-Alex Rubin. Watch it at the top of the page, or see the video directly above to dive into the science behind the Hoverboard.
Keyword: The Good Oil: Back when Lexus looked forward to the future