Watch Tony Hawk Ride A Hoverboard, For Real This Time
This article is more than 2 years old
For those of us who have been waiting for a real hoverboard since we first saw Back to the Future Part II all the way back in 1989, the wait is over. We first wrote about the Hendo Hover towards the end of last month, and now we’ve got our best look at it yet, taken for a test spin by skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. And yes, that’s just as awesome as it sounds. Check out the video for yourself.
It’s hard not to watch this and get totally psyched. And this video is real, 100% completely real, not like that fake Funny or Die video that featured Hawk and Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd from a while back that fooled everyone and then enraged everyone that it duped. (How dare you lie about hoverboard technology, don’t you know this is serious business?)
The video shows Hawk and Dave Carnie (fans of the mid-1990s skate mag Big Brother, which is where Johnny Knoxville first showed up, pre-Jackass, will feel a nice twinge of nostalgia) testing out the prototype, which Hendo Hover successfully crowd funded recently (they raised $450,000 against a $250,000 goal). They take the board for a spin on what amounts to a hover skatepark—given the design and the way the device functions, you need a specialized set up. It works with magnetic fields, so you need a metal surface beneath you, so right now, the range is rather limited. So basically now that this is an option, we’re going to start the movement to cover every surface on Earth in sheets of non-ferromagnetic conductive materials so we can ride these bad boys everywhere. Right?
The design features a quartet of engines that generate the magnetic field and cause the board to hover approximately an inch above the ground, and as you can tell in the video, it works pretty well. While our main focus is obviously to use this to mass produce hoverboards, the creators have bigger ideas in mind for this technology, but use the hoverboard as a means to generate public interest and to show off what they can do.
More altruistic, practical purposes are all well and good, but damn, it’s almost impossible for us to look at this as anything other than a way to up the game as far a skateboarding goes. Sure, this will set you back about ten grand, but holly shit, if you have $10,000 to spare, why the hell not spend it on a hoverboard?
