Lexus has already shown off a splashy highlight reel of the hoverboard it built earlier this year for an admittedly impressive, but one-off showcase.
Now it’s revealed in the most detail yet how it actually pulled it off.
In a pair of new videos, the luxury brand interviewed rider Ross McGrouran (“I’m the hoverboard dude, I guess that’s what I’m going to be known as after this”) and the technical engineers behind the project on the difficulties and dangers. “I came in excited, like a little kid, going ‘right, we’ll have a good, let’s see what it is capable of’,” McGrouran said. “When we started setting up the jump, making it higher, making the gap bigger, we progressed quick — really quick.”
In a separate video Dietmar Berger, magnetic levitation engineer, said “we thought it would not work” when the idea was first proposed. “But let’s try it”. He explains how the track actually has three poles — two north and a south pole — and how the superconductors inside the board kept cool with liquid nitrogen are able to levitate above the track. “This project may show [other people] nothing is impossible.”
Unfortunately these videos can’t change the disappointing facts at the heart of the Lexus project, which are that the hoverboard is running on a track, that it only works as long as the liquid nitrogen can keep it cool enough, that it’s sort of impossible to ride unless you’re a professional skateboarder, and there are no plans to build one you could actually ride.
For that we pretty much have to make do with various hoverboard-like scooters and Hollywood movies — at least until October 21 2015, the date on which it is written commercial hoverboards will definitely, for sure, 100 percent be available from Mattel.
