“Watch out for false confidence,” Darren Pereira warns me as I step onto a hoverboard.
Pereira, who started selling hoverboards earlier this year through his company, Hüüver, knows the device can be tricky, at least at first.
Unlike so many of the celebrities, including Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj, whose easy-gliding ways have helped make hoverboards the hot plaything of the moment, I am far from a graceful rider. Like everything else designed for teenagers, using it feels awkward and unnatural.
And no, hoverboards don’t actually hover. The technology that makes them so eye-catching – and makes a first-time user so unstable – is a battery, two gyroscopes and a logic board, among other parts, which contributes to the price tag ranging from $300 to $1,800, even though there is little difference between the actual products. They weigh 22 lbs and have a top speed of 10 kilometres an hour, which will get you to the mall that much faster. The battery takes slightly more than two hours to charge, and can power a board for nine hours.
They move with the slightest adjustment – lean forward and you’ll go forward, turn your head and look to your right and that’s where it will go. It looks like magic, without the clunky image of its technological cousin, the Segway. Unlike that decidedly uncool foray into mechanized personal transportation, if you have a teenager or a twentysomething in your life, this is the holiday gift they actually want.
Today’s hoverboards aren’t the same devices Marty McFly rode in Back to the Future Part II, but they are a uniquely 21st-century toy.
“There’s irrational excitement to step on to the future,” says Mark Payne, president of Fahrenheit 212, an innovation consultancy based in New York and London. “It’s going to be the go-to gift for a while.”
Payne’s 14-year-old son has been begging for one, even though he can’t explain why he wants one so badly.
Perhaps it’s the star power.
Kendall Jenner, Lily Allen and Jamie Foxx have all been seen riding hoverboards in recent months. The rapper Wiz Khalifa helped make hoverboards international news earlier this year when he was tackled by police while riding one through Los Angeles International Airport.
“I stand for our generation and our generation is gonna be riding hoverboards,” he said.
Everyone older than 30 probably shook their heads at the ridiculousness of that statement. Everyone younger probably nodded in agreement.
“Celebrities are the main driving factor for any kind of interest in these,” says Armida Ascano, vice-president of research strategy at Trend Hunter, a Toronto-based website dedicated to identifying everything at the forefront of what’s cool.
The first hoverboard, produced by Chic Robotics, a company in China, debuted in 2014. Ever since, other manufacturers have taken the basic idea – two wheels and a pair of gyroscopes – and churned out their own versions.
Pereira, who has worked in marketing for more than a decade, first saw a hoverboard at an electronics trade show in Las Vegas last year.
“I was like, ‘This is going to change the way we move,’” Pereira says.
He contacted the manufacturer and was told the minimum order was five.
“I ordered five and started in the hoverboard business,” Pereira says.
People always stop him as he rides his hoverboard around Toronto. He estimates he’s let up to 700 people try it, and then waits for their reactions.
“It’s always surprise and wonder,” he says.
But this isn’t just some plaything, Pereira says. It is the beginning of a sea change.
“We’re entering a robotics transportation revolution,” he says.
Aquiles Santana began selling hoverboards in Toronto this summer.
“The market I’m targeting is commuters,” he says. “You can get off the bus, the train or the subway and then continue riding that short distance [to work],” he says.
The optimistic hype is much like the early buzz that surrounded the Segway PT (personal transporter) when it was introduced in 2001. But the vehicle that was going to replace the automobile fizzled because of its high cost, impracticality and in no small part because of how ridiculous everyone looked while riding it.
Riding a hoverboard comes with plenty of self-consciousness, mostly because everyone you pass is looking at you like an animal they’ve never seen before and needing to decide: “Are you a threat? Are you adorable? Or are you just plain weird?”
If more people “hover,” the less strange it will become, of course. But that’s a big “if.”
A better name might help it be embraced by a large audience, says David Placek, chief executive officer of Lexicon Branding, a California-based company that has helped christen multiple products, from BlackBerry to Febreze.
“This is a truly new innovation, and it should have a new name,” Placek says.
The name “hoverboard” sets up expectations the actual product can’t fulfill: “For some it’s confusing, and I think for most of us it just underdelivers,” he says.
I wasn’t thinking about its name the first time I stepped onto a hoverboard.
My legs wobbled like a baby deer on ice.
“Those are hover legs,” Pereira told me.
It took me about 10 minutes to get comfortable. Then I began zipping around, testing what it could do. I stopped and stood on the thing. Then I lost my balance and fell off. I hit my butt hard on the pavement and nearly cracked my skull open.
As I would find out later, I am not alone. There’s a large and growing number of online videos of similar #hoverfails. The videos are all part of our fascination.
Once that wears off, however, hoverboards will have to find a way to become useful to us if they are going to last, Payne says.
“The need it’s serving right now is to be a little piece of the future and a cool new thing to try,” he says.
Beyond that, will they have a practical use? Just as we now see millennials and Gen-Y’ers hopping on and off skateboards as part of their commute, will we see the hoverboard gain traction and become part of the future routine of first adopters? That’s anyone’s guess. But while they’re here, enjoy the ride.
And if you plan on buying one as a holiday gift, don’t forget a helmet to go along with it.
How it works
The technology that makes a hoverboard work is designed to make it feel intuitive. The key to it all is gyroscopes, of which there are two.
Gyroscopes have a spinning wheel that is mounted so that its axis can turn in any direction, while the orientation of the wheel is totally unaffected by the tilting or spinning of the mountings. When you step onto the board, each gyroscope calibrates, basically establishing what is “flat.”
As you tilt your feet forward or back, switches activate battery-powered motors inside each wheel. Sensors inside the board tell the gyroscopes how far you are leaning, and that information is sent to the logic board – essentially the hoverboard’s brain.
The logic board then knows how fast to spin the motors in order to adjust to your centre of gravity. The more you tilt, the faster the wheels spin. If you tilt more with your right foot than your left, the right wheel will spin faster, allowing you to turn.
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