It’s been months now that Lexus has been teasing its working hoverboard called “Slide,” but now we finally get to see it in action.
The below video of Hoverboard test rider Ross McGouran and some friends trying out the board on Lexus’ custom-built skate park is truly cool and feels a bit like watching a childhood fantasy realized, except that it’s not quite the fantasy as we know it from “Back to the Future: Part II.”
The first thing to know about the Slide is that it’s basically a maglev board propelled by the rider, which means it will only work over a magnetized surface. So nobody will be flying all over Hill Valley or just about anywhere else except for Lexus’ specially built skate park. That also means you won’t be able to buy one anytime soon, the whole thing is just an exercise in brand-building for Lexus.
The technology involved in this hoverboard isn’t exactly groundbreaking, either. It runs off of superconducting levitation, which basically involves running a supercooled superconductor over a magnetic field. A low profile cryostat is used to keep the superconductors in the hoverboard at a cold enough temperature for riding and while it looks as though McGouran is all over the skate park in the video, he’s actually sticking to a narrow magnetized track below a very thin covering that blends in with the rest of the park surface.
I’ve seen how superconducting levitation works on a much smaller scale, and the tricky parts here are to keep the superconductors at temperatures approaching -200 celsius and to create a system that will support the weight of a human rider, something that Lexus seems to have achieved in style. That’s to say nothing of figuring out how to actually maneuver the thing.
“The feeling of literally no friction and floating on air… it’s kind of like a science in itself,” says McGouran.
For another first-person take on riding a real hoverboard, check out the review from Robb Holland at Jalopnik who was given the chance to test it out on the Lexus track setup in Barcelona. You can also get more details on the making of Slide in the short Lexus documentary below.
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