You like the idea of surfing on… air? Hoverboards are sorta here! By Lexus!
Fuck nostalgia. Fuck the good ol’ days. Today is the best time to be alive in history. Why? Because shit like this comes across your desk:
“Lexus has worked with experts in super-conductive technology to create one of the most advanced Hoverboards the world has seen.”
That’s the second sentence of an oddly amateur-looking press release I received today. Lexus, purveyor of slightly-better-than-Toyota cars and SUVs, has tried their hand at The Most Advanced Hoverboard the World Has Seen.
Is it coincidence that the hoverboard heavy world depicted in Back to the Future 2 was a fictional 2015?
Anyhow, Lexus worked with superconductivity vets, hoping to use magnetic levitation with conductors cooled by liquid nitrogen and permanent magnets. The result?
“Frictionless movement.”
Imagine, literally floating in air, frictionless.
Alas, there’s a catch.
Two catches, actually: One, it only hovers in a controlled environment. I imagine one with a magnetic surface? And two, like cruel fucking assholes, Lexus and co. won’t be selling these slick sleds.

The Hoverboard was developed as part of Lexus’ new Amazing in Motion campaign, which is one big PR wet dream—Lexus’s engineers get to live out some childhood fantasies, everyone guffaws at their bold, brash ingenuity, and in the end they don’t have to actually make anything that is actually production-ready.
Here’s how EVP Mark Templin laid it all out: “At Lexus we constantly challenge ourselves and our partners to push the boundaries of what is possible. That determination, combined with our passion and expertise…” and it sort of goes on like that for a while. Whatever.
For all the self-congratulatory edicts, there’s not actually any footage of anyone riding one of the things. The promotional video shows a skateboarder rolling up on a trusty four-wheeled steed, then dismounting for the Hoverboard. His black, crepe-soled shoes threaten to light upon the Hoverboard’s deck, a plume of dry ice smoke rising from its seams.
And then, like so many dreams, it cuts to black.