The Vergecast - Version History: Hoverboards

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

In 2015, self-balancing scooters (which quickly became known as hoverboards) exploded in popularity, and then began literally exploding. Andrew Hawkins and Sean O’Kane join David Pierce to explore the multiple conflicting origin stories behind the hugely popular rideable, the many knockoffs, and why a device that doesn't actually hover ended up being called "hoverboard." If you like the show, subscribe to the Version History feed to make sure you get every new episode. Let us know what you think: 866-VERGE-11 or [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the Flagship podcast of other new podcasts. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I want to play you an episode of a new show we're launching called version history. Version History is basically our version of a rewatch podcast. If you've ever listened to or watch those shows where people get together to talk about how old movies got made or go episode by episode through your favorite TV show, we want to do that. But with the most important and least important and most interesting gadgets and apps that have ever existed, it's going to be very fun. And I want you to hear all of it. want to know what you think about how the show works, the structure of the show, the questions we ask at the end, all of it. So take a listen, send us your feedback, and most importantly,

go subscribe to version history. We're going to make lots of episodes of that show, and they won't all be here. So make sure you get them when they first come out on the version history feed wherever you get podcasts. Here's this episode. Let's go. Walking. So old school, right? It's like if you want to go across the office or down the street or to the other side of the building, you have to use your feet. Like it's the middle ages. It's who has the time? You know what I mean?

Well, I have a better way. They're hoverboards. They're those two-wheeled self-balancing scooters, and they are all the rage. From The Verge and Vox Media, this is version history, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products

in the history of technology. I'm David Pierce, and today we are going for a ride. A definitely dangerous and potentially explosive ride. Stay tuned. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets,

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Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

9s dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. All right, we're back. Let's talk hoverboards. Andy Hawkins is here. Hi, Andy. Sean O'Kane is here. That band is back together.

This is exciting. This is very exciting. First, let's just talk about relative hoverboard expertise. Andy, you have a confession to make, I believe. This is very shameful for me to admit, but I have never actually written on a hoverboard. At some point, that's a choice you made. It was, because we had one in the office. It was always there.

Other, you know, co-workers were blasting around. I was writing about it very frequently. And yet I still have not put my dainty little feet on the platform. Any regrets? No, none at all. No, no, no. Zero regrets about that. I actually, I feel better about it today.

Every day that goes by, I feel even better about the decision. Think of how much more complicated your commute to bring your kids to school could have been, if you had stuck with the hoverboard. That's right. My first ever hoverboard experience, I will never forget this moment. I got it on Amazon, took it out of the box, and I was in Oakland, in my apartment, and I was like, okay, my living room is tiny. It was in like, 800 square foot apartment.

I was like, I don't have any room to ride this thing. I'm going to take it down to the street. First mistake right there. I was like very early in the hoverboard world at this point. So I was like, I didn't know how any of this work. So I take it down to the sidewalk. I went, I don't know, 18 inches into like the line between. two of the blocks on the sidewalk and just absolutely launched myself into traffic.

Like in the middle of the road, eight seconds after getting a hoverboard. And then I was like, all right, I'm in it now. So we're very lucky to still have you here with us. It's a small miracle. Sean, what about you? Have written, have not stuck with it. Okay. breaking all of the cameras, no.

Okay. No. Give me a wide open space, you know, put me on an airport runway. Oh, yeah. I could probably cruise. A gymnasium. A recently paved airport runway. I could probably cruise pretty well.

Okay. That's, I mean, that comes for something. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is I'm the best at hoverboards. This is a great way to start. But we all covered this pretty aggressively. I was at Wired at the time. You two were both at the verge during like the entirety of the hoverboard craze.

You were both like covering it a lot is my memory of it. Right. Like it was, it was a huge story in a way that is, I think, very easy to forget now. There are so many parts to the story that I hadn't remembered until I was looking back. Like, it's not just about the product. It was about what we called it. It was about who was riding it. It was about this celebrity craze of all of them probably getting paid to ride them or just like thinking they were cool. And there were all that. I mean, it was just there was, to me, it's also like a harbinger of what was to come with sort of the trade war stuff that we've been in over the last couple of years. years of sort of rapid production and domestic manufacturing in China. And it was a deeper story than I remembered.

All the safety implications. Yeah. That was sort of where I came into the story was once like they started exploding and catching on fire was when I was like, oh, this is more than just your average, like, cheap product out of China that people are really into. There's something else going on here. Yeah. I think this was also, I had forgotten kind of the beginning of the like last mile

craze where everyone was obsessed with this idea that like what we're going to do is not just have hoverboards but we're going to reinvent the way that you move small distances which seems insane to think about now but I was like I was all in on this idea at the time and there were like we were doing weird electric skates there were a bunch of different skateboard ideas you ended up covering boosted board for like forever after this all of that maybe not starts with this but kind of starts with this this was like the beginning of the idea of the idea of of like what weird stuff can I put under my feet that are going to make it fun to move around the office warehouse neighborhood, what have you.

And weird times. Yeah. I still have a bunch of those things at my house. It was, I mean, it was a more optimistic time, right? We were watching Google's little sort of cutesy autonomous vehicle for the first time, navigate some streets. We were thinking about electric aircraft and all this stuff. Everything was in the concept phase.

And so these became sort of the first tangible things of like, this is what the future will be like. as far as how you're going to move around. I think that was one of the reasons that fueled all that stuff. And it was also, honestly, I think there's an element of the Tesla piece here where there was all this talk at the time about the rapid acceleration of development of electric motors, of battery technology, the miniaturization of that, the lowering of the cost. It's going to revolutionize the kinds of things you can build because they're no longer cost prohibitive. and so it was just all of that stuff got swept up into what became this weird thing, this weird thing that we called the album. I think it's also sort of like there's a germ of like influencer culture that like kind of birthed out of this as well.

Like we didn't really have like there wasn't like a professional like a professional influencer. Yeah, this thing would have numbers on TikTok shop. Seriously. And like it was like we needed to have the celebrities be the ones to like introduce us to this weird gadget, right? as opposed to just like all of the, you know, eventually what became, you know, like influencers as we know them today. So I always thought that was really interesting. Totally. Okay.

So this was a weird one because most of the things we talk about on the show sort of start in one obvious place. Hoverboards very much do not. Let me just sort of lay out the like two parallel histories here and we can sort of talk to it. So on one parallel history, we have this guy named Shane Chen, who is an inventor, lives in the Pacific Northwest. has been into, like, rideably things for forever. And in 2013, he files a patent for a thing called the hover tracks with an X at the end, so you know it's cool. And he called it a two-wheel self-balancing vehicle made with independently movable foot placement sections.

And, like, the thing that made it new and not a segue was that it had essentially two distinct platforms, both attached to a wheel, and you could move them independently, right? And so the whole thing was, like, you push them forward and it goes forward, you push them backwards, and it goes backwards, you push one and pull one, and it turns. So that was like his big technical change. He set up a Kickstarter for this thing. He had, he has said since that he had this idea in 2011. Patton said it in 2013.

Does the Kickstarter on 2013 raises like a little over $80,000 from, I think it was, 162 backers on Kickstarter, which is fine. Numbers. Congratulations. Yeah, he did it. It hit its goal. See, you're getting in on the ground floor on hoverboards. You're living that billionaire lifestyle.

Seriously. You know, that's what you want to be. You want to be one of those original seed investors. Well, well, our boy Shane Chen might have different feelings than that. But let me just, this is the most like 2013 Kickstarter video ever. So let me just play you a short clip from the Kickstarter. This is my latest dimension. It's called hover tracks.

Because he has two wheels. So you can stand still. And you put your feet on here, you lean forward, you move forward, then back, you come back. And you press one foot forward and one foot back, you spin. Or you can make turn when you're moving forward. And this is very convenient and very portable. I love this because he's like, this is the most like I invented a thing and I have no idea what it's for video of all time. Yes.

Do you want to back this on Kickstarter? Take all my money, please. Yeah, exactly. So, okay, so all of this is happening. Patents it, starts to ship it out. There were some delays because of poor shenanigans. But, like, shipped a bunch of things to actual people in the world and in America. That's one version of the history.

The other version of the history starts in China with this company called Sheik Robotics, which is one of the, like, big factories in China have a lot of, like, little tiny house brands. So there's, like, a million companies. companies inside of this one factory. Sheik robotics is one of them. They start making what they call self-balancing scooters that look a lot like our buddy Shane's hover tracks in August of 2014. And these, I did a story about these a million years ago in which I went back and looked

through, went back when this is a thing you could do every YouTube video that had ever been posted about these things all the way back to the beginning. And the very first one I ever found was from August 2014 of a device called the smart S1 from Sheik Robotics. So Sheik Robotics makes this device. They take it to the largest trade show in China. It's a big hit. One of the stories of these things kind of over and over is that one of the ways they

grow is by taking a bunch to a convention center somewhere and then just like have people ride them around. Sure. And they become this like weird viral phenomenon over and over. I think we all had this experience at CES one year. It was just one of those things where they just showed up. And it was, you know, that was, I think CES is its most fun. is when there are people who are sort of at the edges

and aren't part of the whole machine of sort of setting up a schedule and like getting people of meeting and they just have a fun idea and they're like, and this thing, you know, to your point about it catching people's eye

in spaces like that, there's something so unsettling about seeing the top half of a person moving without bobbing up and down. And I think that like, honestly, I think that's a small part but an important part of like why this thing caught

so many people's eyes because if you see someone moving like that, you're like, what is going on? Right. Well, and it's like a few inches off the ground. So you're the tallest person in the room all of a sudden, and you're just kind of slowly moving towards everyone.

Like it is deeply, like, alarming. You're like on a dolly almost. Yeah, exactly. So, okay, so Sheik makes this thing. And their version of this story is relatively straightforward. Like Sheik makes a thing. Finds a bunch of distributors. Those distributors put logos and stickers on it,

and they, you know, change the manufacturing a little bit. And they start to ship it all over the world. Those are the two versions of the story. Shane Chen, who we should point out was out doing this earlier publicly. What he says is that what Sheik did was basically look at his Kickstarter page, take the photos and the video, and reverse engineer their product out of it. This is a thing that is very hard to know. It has been litigated endlessly, which will come up over and over again throughout this story. But it tracks.

The place that I've landed is like the thing that we have in the United States looks more like that. one from Sheik than it does the one, the hover tracks that Shane Chen made the year before. And then whatever happened, everybody else ripped off their intellectual property, right? So as soon as even this stuff comes out, and as soon as these things start to get manufactured, they are just immediately everywhere. And so, like, when they first came to the U.S., which was pretty quick, they came, my recollection at least is not sort of as, there was not one product that showed up and then a bunch of knockoffs. It was all knockoffs from day.

one. Yeah. Which was just weird. And they all had the weirdest names. It was always like some sort of like bizarre combination of English words that didn't really seem like they made sense together. Like car wind feels. Another sort of harbinger of what was to come.

I feel like this is a proto version of like the Alphabet Soup like Amazon best that we have today of like, I'm going to buy an electric toothbrush. This one that's called X9Z2B free looks good. I'll say, to the hoverboard's credit, one of them was called Funky Duck with a pH, and that's very good. So we did, we made a clip of some of our favorite hoverboard brand names. Let me just play this for you. This is a swaggerweight. This is a funky duck.

This is hovercraft. This is the epigal classic. This is the Mono Rover 2. Carl Lifestyle. Ilech. The hoverboard 360. This particular model is called the Lee Ray self-balancing scooter. They also call it the Dream Wall.

Walker. Oh, Tree Walker. That's ominous. I was like my favorite version, my favorite version of this story is, uh, I believe it was Funky Duck sent one of their scooters to Soldier Boy, uh, which is a very 2015 sentence to say out loud. And then like, like days later, soldier boy starts selling a board.

I believe it's called the Soldier Board. Yeah. Because why not? Literally. and the picture is just him standing on the board that Funky Duck sent him. Yeah. This is just where we were at the time.

I love it. It was, you know, a Cambrian explosion of the same thing. The thing that always amazed me is that none of these things looked any different from the next one. They all looked almost identical. Like, you line them all up together

and you would have a difficulty like applying brand names to any of them because they just all looked the same. And what was funny is every one of the company would hate that characterization, right? Because they were all like, oh, well, A, we have big plans for the second one. Get ready for... As soon as we know what that is and where we're going to get the idea from.

We're going to be all kinds of stuff on Funky Duck, too. Like, you're not even going to believe it. But then they would all say, you know, everybody else is using shoddy batteries and they're not doing any safety testing and they don't care about it. But we are the ones doing a good job. And, I mean, down that line of what you're describing, every single one of them would have said that to you. which is just delightful.

But anyway, so these companies start suing each other and pointing fingers at each other. You have Funky Duck and Iohawk, both of which I guess are distributing chic robotics, which may or may not be knocking off. The hover tracks, this is, look, I lose my mind trying to explain all of the layers of this. Seriously. And so everybody just starts to fight. But meanwhile, this thing is everywhere. Like, my memory of it is essentially overnight all of a sudden. Like, this went from being a thing I had never heard of and never cared about.

to being like front and center in pop culture. Because it's also hit right around the same time. I feel like I'm remembering correctly that Instagram really became a place for celebrities to post. That wasn't the case for a while. I remember it was just sort of like, you know, artful of pictures and filtered whatever and your friends because you were coming, well, you weren't coming from Facebook, but, you know, they bought it eventually. But this idea that we were getting a glimpse of the sort of polished version of a celebrity's home life and all of a sudden, into that comes like some of the first product. To your point earlier, just like this was sort of like proto-influencer marketing, like celebrity

influencer marketing where they were getting these products and dangle them in the front of our face. I remember other ones being like, you know, Lewis Hamilton riding some sort of like electric surfboard. There's a lot of this stuff happening at the time, but this was certainly the most viral. I went back. I did a really, really unnecessary Instagram deep dive to figure out who was the first celebrity to post a hoverboard.

Who do you think it was? Oh, gosh. Paul Giamatti. No. That would be amazing. I yearn for that content. In his like full John Adams garb. Love that.

God, I don't know. That's a good one. He's very famous. And I love his music unironically. John Mayer? Justin Bieber. Okay. Oh, okay.

Justin Bieber, I think historically speaking, kind of gets a lot of credit for like single-handedly making hoverboards a thing. and the more I research it, the more I think he's right. But here, let me just play you. This is the very first video I could find. This is from May, I believe, 14th of 2015. This is like the celebrity birth of hoverboards. And it's just him spinning around, taking one foot off, which is a fairly advanced maneuver. I mean, is it him?

Well, look at those pants. Look at those shorts. And then he fell back. I'm just saying. The caption in that video is something like, I died right after this. Yeah, sure. Even though we didn't see his face, I know that this was floppy-air era. It had to have been, right?

Without question. Okay. Yeah. I'm a truther. I'm not going to love. You don't think it was your beep? No. Beebbs body double did a lot of work in 2015 on a hoverboard.

It was Giamati. It was Giamani. But I love that clip because, A, to your point, this was, like, early Instagram video when, like, no one would be caught dead making. that low quality Yeah, it wasn't even a good vine. No, there was no music.

No, it was too long. He spins in a bunch of circles. He falls. Nothing funny happened, yeah. But that was huge. And then it just absolutely took off. So like, here's just a small percentage of the list of people.

Wiz Khalifa, Nick Jonas, Zed, Kendall Jenner, J.R. Smith, who, I don't know if you guys remember this if you're basketball fans, rode one in the tunnel to, I believe, the NBA finals. And it was like, it was like a, Like a national news moment. Millions of people watching J.R. Smith just like potentially injure himself all the way to the locker room. Nikki Minaj, Nina Agdahl, the model, David Ortiz, Kreme Benzima, the soccer player, Scrillex, who he came very well known for his hoverboarding.

Yeah, that should have been my guess. And then all of the late night hosts. Yes. This was like a staple of late night TV. All the Jimmy's. All the Jimmy's and Jameses and all of them. And so, like, this was, this was like a huge thing. And the thing that I had forgotten was how short a period of time that actually was.

Because this is basically, so like, Beaver posts in March. And then we spend kind of May, June, July, August, culturally obsessed with Harvard. Is this 2016? 2015. This is literally, this is all, this is, this whole story is one year long. It's nuts. I also remember, like, it was either 2015 or 2016, but like, whatever, uh, you. year the holidays came around yeah it was insane yeah that like every kid was like I want one of

these so bad like that's the only thing that I want mom and dad and it was like everyone it was like you know rushing to get you know wherever you could get one you know people fighting over them at black friday deals like it was and there were absolutely no problems with these things sitting under flammable Christmas trees none at all none at all what a good segue that is so all of this happens and then what do hoverboards start doing they start exploding which is where Andy comes into the story do you do you remember any of the like early versions of this story I remember being very like you know panic panicked like this is a problem because yes they started exploding they were catching on fire there was some deaths I think associated with it like it was it was bad yeah and it's it's

useful to remember that these things are huge yeah which is like it's not like if you're even your phone battery exploded because this is just before the the galaxy note shenanagan like yes really like we were actually so prepared for the note seven because of hoverboards so right this is actually hoverboards are we're we're learning moments for me in multiple ways one was this is where I first learned what uL certification is yes same important because we spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether or not post this sort of fire stuff starting whether or not each individual company had gotten UL certification, most of them hadn't, and how important that can be. And then, and, you know, that was just a big, that was a big one.

Yeah. Yeah. UL certification is another thing that one of those you're like, why, I wish I had never needed to learn about this. Here we are. I'm glad it exists and I hope I never think about it again. Yeah. Okay, I have a couple of clips I would like to play for you of hoverboard explosions because

what are we here for it? It's not hoverboard explosions. It's a gawk. Hoverboards are red hot in more ways than blonde. There has been another reported fire involving the popular self-balancing scooters. I came down the sidewalk, not even probably 100 feet, and it exploded. It said, boom. But how do they explode so well?

Simple. We take a battery from a 90 cell phone and make it power a motor designed for a small car. Safety officials saying all the hoverboards sold in the U.S. are unsafe. There's a stroll. There's a strolling for a company to continue to sell hoverboards that they know do not comply with the standard. And since not a single one has been certified as safe, the Consumer Product Safety Commission warns consumers risk serious injury or death if their self-balancing scooters ignite and burn. Well, and as soon as that came down, like everywhere started banning them, right?

Yeah. The MTA, all the airlines banned them. Walmart was like pulling them off the shelves. Pulling them off the shelves. You couldn't go through TSA security with one if you had it. Like it was just sort of like it was a free-for-all. and then nowhere would allow them to have them anywhere. Yeah, like almost immediately.

Yeah. There were just, it just, it fully turned. I just remember that they took, you remember at the time, they were all those MTA sort of helpful hint things on the subway with like the sort of simply drawn figure people. Like the cartoon people. Yeah, and they had ones for the hoverboard. It was like, don't bring this on board.

I think they're still up there. Probably in some of them, yes. And I remember it would, some of them would be animated on some of the video screens. And it would be like, you know, big X over like guy, trying to bring a like little simply drawn hoverboard onto the subway. Like I lived in the city for like, you know, 20 years and I don't think I ever saw anybody. I think I saw some people carrying that, but I've never saw anyone use one on a subway. I'm just wondering like how the physics of that work.

If you're going back and the train is going forward, are you just standing still if you're writing the hoverboard? How does that work? See, that I would give somebody a dollar for that on the subway. Yeah. It's like Mariachi band. That's your showtime. That's showtime. Yeah.

Absolutely. Especially if you can like spin up through the bars with the hubber. We haven't even talked about the ones that have like built in speakers and lights. Yes. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. No, this is the right time because this was like that was the other thing. It was time for Funky Duk 2, baby. There you go.

Well, so at this point, there are basically one of three things is going to happen. Either this whole thing is going to die. It's going to get safer and better or it's just going to get weirder. And for a minute, it just got weirder. To your point. So people started modding these things. companies now that there had been like more time to actually rev the product and ship the stuff and more people were manufacturing it there were all these weird new ideas about stuff

you could put in it like speakers which i remember being just a full nightmare of a idea yet somehow like deeply appropriate this thing is so garret i mean it already was essentially like a party speaker on wheels so like making it a party speaker on wheels was like yeah yeah that tracks yeah and there i remember seeing like increasingly crazy light shows coming out of the side of them. That lasted for a minute. And then the third thing happened, which is it all fell apart. But we need to take a break really quickly.

And then we're going to talk about what actually happened to Hopperports. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce.

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That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWRK.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. So, end of 2015. It all kind of goes sideways. Everything's exploding. Like the hoverboard was sideways.

The hoverboard. I fell off the hoverboard metaphorically and literally in 2015. But the big thing, to your point about holidays from before, the big thing that happened was Amazon stopped selling. All of the hoverboards, like all at once. And we all know that's the only way to buy anything these days. I mean, kind of. It was like, it was really interesting because I went back and was looking at the beginning of the story, there was this run of people buying on Alibaba and a lot of like drop shipping stuff happening from some of these factories in China.

And then all those factories just started selling directly on Amazon. And so that became the place everybody bought hoverboards, like for a long time. And then Amazon just essentially overnight just stopped selling them. And so you just couldn't get them. And this happened like at holiday season. So a lot of people had them already. But now they are a safety risk that is being broadcast to everyone is a huge safety risk. You literally can't buy one, and the whole thing just kind of just poof disappears overnight.

There are people trying to make that happen either more slowly or reverse it. So Razor, the scooter company, buys that original 2013 patent from Shane Chen in 2015 and decides to simultaneously go make safer, more legit versions of the hoverboard. They start to get the UL certification. they start to go take more care of the batteries and start to actually build these things in a safe way. And they go just sue the pants off of everybody else who is making hoverboards. Everybody's suing everybody. And then there just becomes this question of like, is any of this different enough to be defensible?

And as far as I can tell, overwhelmingly the answer became somewhere between no and nobody cares. And I think that just seemed to be the end of the story there is everybody picked the. these fights forever about these patents and then just kind of decided it's too much. Our court system does not move nearly at the speed of sort of viral, viral anything, let alone viral like product. It was never going to be something they could sort out in time for this thing, for it to matter for this product. Yeah.

It was just always destined to come out of fashion before a judgment came from some district court judge. True. Well, I found myself wondering, like, I think the thing that there's no coming. coming back from was all the safety stuff, right? Like, there was just no, it got so bad and so publicized that I think even now, I suspect, everyone's first association with hoverboards is explosions. Yeah.

Like, and there's just no coming back from that. But I do wonder, because if you rewind to the beginning of 2015, like, again, this whole story takes place in 12 months, which is insanity. But if you rewind back to the beginning of it, there was a real sense, this thing, is huge. Everybody's into it. It's a good idea. It's a fun product.

People like it. But there is no brand that's going to work. And I think it was Joe Bernstein in BuzzFeed that compared it to Jetsky. Where it's like, there are lots of ways to move around on the water. There's only one jet ski. And if you could have been the one to come in

and be like, okay, screw I-O-Hawks, screw Funky Duck, all these dumb brands, we're going to be the one. Like the sort of brand name, the Kleenex of the space, that that was going to be. massively, massively valuable. And it's sort of sad to me that we didn't get to see that.

It could have happened. If they didn't explode and they didn't catch on fire and people hadn't died, we could have gotten to a point where there might have been some sort of incumbent, whether it was, you know, Isle Hawker or Mark Cuban's thing or whatever it was, that could have emerged eventually had there been more time, I think. But because there was this like hard stop at, you know, explosions. It didn't really get there. And we're still kind of in a place where there's a million different brands and they

are still available. And they're a lot safer, obviously, now than they were before. But I feel it because there was that disruption in the mid, in like sort of like right in midstream as this thing was getting going, it kind of prevented it from happening. I think that moment, too, it was a reset moment because not only was there a safety threat, even people who didn't really care much about that, couldn't really buy them as easily all of a sudden. And I think that that gave people enough space to realize like what really is the utility of this thing.

You know, you talked earlier about this idea that was sort of really in vogue at the time of like the last mile thing. You know, you're going to take a, you know, a train somewhere, but you're going to have that last mile to your destination. Should it be an electric bike, an electric scooter, electric skateboard or something like this. But I think people started to realize in that sort of hangover moment of like, does that. this really actually work like that? I mean, you can take these things down like a sidewalk, but like if there's a bump, like you're kind of doomed. Yeah. You know, and it's like it really, you know, we talked earlier about sort of, we were joking about like, could we even ride it in this studio space? Like it really is a thing that only works that well on like the shiny floors

of Justin Bieber's mansion or or an airport, I guess. But like for real actual transportation, they are not as useful as I think any of those early companies, marketers, whoever would have really wanted people to believe. And there were some attempts at making, changing that a little bit. But it's tricky when you're dealing with self-balancing stuff, especially even if the wheels can handle it, you're going to run into trouble if you're going over sort of uneven surfaces because it's just naturally going to throw off the inputs that you're giving into it. And it just spirals a bit out of control. And so it's, I think, the most competent version of that that we've, ever seen is eventually the Segway 9 bot one that really has, it's essentially a shrunk down

segue with no stock to like lean on with your hands. And that is like something that actually probably works in those settings, but is definitely more cumbersome, not as easy to carry around on the subway or wherever like these were. What is the problem that we're solving with this? Walking. Yeah. Like I think walking's fine. I don't see walking as a problem.

You know, I understand that. Disagree. But no, I mean, like, if that was the problem, because otherwise it was just a novelty and it was just for, it became a punchline eventually where, like, you know, characters on TV, if you saw a character on a show or TV on a hoverboard, it was like that person's a clown, right? Like that, you know, it was like John Ralphio from Parks and Rec or something like that. Like, you know, like that, it was meant to say the signal that this is like an unsurious person. Yeah.

And so that's, and then I think it quickly sort of became associated with less of the, you And more sort of like the jockey like novelty. Which is funny because around that same time, the same sort of aspersions were being cast on people who were using the earliest versions of like the electric kick scooters that we see around a lot of major cities. Yeah. But that has utility to it. So now people care less, probably still some, but less about how weird they look if it just

gets them somewhere and quickly. Yeah. And this was never going to solve that problem. Yeah. I mean, and again, go back to sort of the world at that time. It's like you were talking about. We were like, okay, robo taxis are going to take me everywhere. the hyper loop is going to change my life.

Like we were in this phase of it's not going to be that long until you don't own a car anymore. It was a thing a lot of people would have you believe at the time. And in that world, something like this that is like I just need to quickly get to the coffee shop makes a lot more sense. I own more cars than I did in 2015. And it's like amazing to me that none of the car companies like try to buy like hover tracks or like because that's what they did with the scooter companies, right? They saw like Ford and others saw an opportunity. They're like, we have to get a piece of this. This is going to be huge. And I think because there was that disruption, sort of like mid-cycle as this thing was just gaining momentum, like escape velocity,

it was getting there. Like you could have had like GM swoop in and like buy one of these. I'm dying. I'm like dying thinking about like the 30 page slide deck that someone prepared for Mary Barra at GM of like, here's why we should acquire Iohawk. And then they start It could have to change the world. The future of transportation is the hover tracks. I'm going to invest a billion dollars in cruise instead. Yeah, you could argue which one of those went better. I'm just saying.

So anyway, okay, so the story here basically ends with you can still go to a store and buy a hoverboard, which I will be honest is not a thing I knew until I was researching this story. They're pretty cheap. By all accounts, they're pretty safe. They're just out there. They're mostly now called hover tracks. the whole thing is owned by Razor but I think Shane Chen kind of got his

he won in the end he sold the patent they're still called hover tracks they're still out there I want to talk about two more things before we get to the version history questions one is during all of this you Sean had an actual experience with an actual hoverboard yes

that's one of the crazy things too I feel like this was a thing that we set aside because it was such a weird moment but I think another element of why these things took off was because it was just like hoverboard mania for a few years because there were all these other companies at the time trying to do we were coming up on 2015 was what the 30th anniversary of back to the future the date in fact to the future so you know

there were all these people who are like gearing themselves up to be like all retrospective about back to the future and the hoverboard and and and so I think people were just ready for it and all these other companies, there was this company called Hendo, there was, or ARCS packs, I think, was the one that was actually behind that. And there were, there were all these, they were coming up with weird ways to try to make, all air quotes here, make hoverboards that worked. And it was like, you know, they would be, okay, this one hovers with like magnetics over like non-ferrous metal surfaces. Okay, cool. Like, and they remember. There were science projects.

Yeah, exactly. They were cool. You could just take it anywhere that they're not fair surfaces. For a while, oh man, the name escapes me, but there was one where it was actually from a space company. I think their name was Arka Space. And they were trying to do almost like a ducted fan one that had like 40 or 50 or even more like little ducted fans, which looked like a nightmare to ride because like you're basically balancing on like an airboat, like a small airboat. And so there were all these things. And then the big one that I remember was there was the sort of hoaxy.

video that Tony Hawk did where it was digitally edited to make it look like he was actually riding a hoverboard and it had been created and here it is and it was just some viral stump for something else and it was like that was the moment where that was happening like alongside all of this stuff just sort of fueling the mania and then the the crazies one of all of them was like all of a sudden we got a call one day from a PR rep who worked for Lexus and I pick up the phone because I'm one of those crazy people that picks up every phone call that I get, even if it looks like it's going to be spam, because you never know. And they were like, hey, like, we're doing this thing in Spain. And we want to know if you're interested.

And they were describing it. And it was this whole thing about doing a real hoverboard. And we weren't really sure of all the specifics, but it looked like we were looking at some of the stuff that they were showing us. And it was like, this looks like legit. And I remember just like still on the phone, like scouring the office, looking around. like, where is Sam Schaeffer? We need to get into Spain. And it was like right around Fourth of July, too.

So I remember just being like, I'm sorry if I'm blowing up your holiday, but like, you should go to Spain. Like, you're welcome? There are worse things to be told over the Fourth of July. And it was like, you know, again, it was another one of these things where it was very science experiment. They basically just built an entire skate park that had magnetic rails underneath most of the park. and it was, you know, it was similar to, if you ever seen those things where there's like a super cool piece of some material and it kind of like, you know, hovers over a base of some other material. It was essentially that, but they had balanced it out well and they had worked with some skateboarders and they went through all the work to make it really work, but within its own limits. And it was, I remember he had so much trouble getting it to work because it's in Spain.

It's very hot. It was the summer. The materials they were using had to be cooled to a certain temperature. If it went above it, they had to swap out the board. But, you know, he was able to, you know, even all those constraints, like, set those aside. He was able to ride a skateboard on a skate park that hovered. And it was, like, a really cool moment. Like, we filmed a really good video about it.

And it was, like, such a fun, weird thing. Again, it was just a stunt. But it was, like, all that was happening at the same time that all this stuff was happening, which was, like, fueling the mania of this product, but also even just the idea. of calling them a hoverboard in the first place. Yeah, and this one actually hovered. I have a clip of that video, which if Memory Serves was one of the Verge's most successful and viewed videos.

Still to this day, I think, almost. Truly wild. Here it is. It hovers off the ground like a proper hoverboard, but as I'm sure you've guessed, there are some big caveats, like the track it needs to run on, which is crucial to how the thing works at all. I mean, it looks cool. It's designed well, but it looks like all the liquid nitrogen, which is a liquid nitrogen, coming off, it just like makes it look even. It's...

Nothing about this is real, but it's sick. I mean, it looks like it's on the ground. And if your balance isn't perfectly distributed on this thing, you end up scraping the ground with the undersides of the board. It took me like 15 minutes just to glide a few feet. Oh yeah, you can kind of see. That's a good angle. That was where the heat was working against them too,

where it was like the hotter it was, the less whatever the force was working. So I remember him telling me that he was struggling with. that part of it and it was, it took them a minute to really get one with just the right amount of like the liquid nitrogen or whatever it was to get it to hover in a frame to really try and ride it. I rode one of the ones on the metal surface. Oh yeah? At a hyperloop event, as it were.

In Texas, SpaceX had this big hyperloop competition at Texas A&M University and like one of the vendors that was there showing off like their products was one of the, I forget which one it was. I think it was the Hendo one. It might have been the Hendo one. I remember the funny thing about that was they made you hold hands with somebody while you were on it. So I'm like, this is the most like nursery school demo I've ever done in my entire life. I'm holding hands with this man as I write on the actual. I like that you wrote a hoverboard, but you've never ridden a hoverboard.

Yes, I know. That's one of the weird things about me. I also like that that's like what the future of the Hyperloop should have been. Yes. Like just put up rails and let us all hoverboard from San Francisco to LA while holding hands. Well, they're all about magnetic levitation. Right. at Hyperloop Inc.

That's exactly right. So, okay, and then the last thing we have to talk about, which is the only thing that matters in this entire thing. All of this has been a waste, except for one important question, which is why the hell are these things called hoverboards? They don't hover. Yeah.

Fair. Point taken. But they are hoverboards. And they just are hoverboards. There was never any other good name to call them. You know, like, we ran through a few of them already. Like, self-balancing a scooter. You know, just nothing that like really rolls off the tongue.

And then, you know, where that comes from, I don't even really remember. Again, there was this sort of cultural thing happening. Like I said, at the same time where hoverboards were in our mind in a way that they hadn't been in years prior. And so, you know, I think it just became a good shorthand for it. And again, like to what, like I said earlier, if you're not looking at what somebody's doing and you're just seeing their like torso and head coming at you, it looks like you're hovering. It looks like you are floating at me as a specter about to like, you know, it's just, yeah, I get it. So I want to see if we can rename this thing very quickly. Knowing what we know now, is there a better name for this thing?

I mean, I kind of agree with Sean that you can't really beat hoverboard in terms of like the cultural connotations that it has. Rollyboard. No bad ideas. Golly board. Glide ride. Can we just call it a scooter? Spin doctor. Yeah.

there you go. Glide Ratt is actually very good. It's nothing, but it's very good. Spin doctor's good. I like spin doctor. I can see somebody selling it as the spin doctor. Yeah. The company is called something.

Brand name. Yeah. For sure. Tilt o whirl. This is all making me like hoverboard. Ass blaster. You fall in your ass. Zoom scooter.

Foot. There's probably something with foot. Right. Yeah. Foot wheel. Footmobile. That's going to get a whole other demographic. Yeah.

Interesting in it. Listen. The foot demographic. All right. Fine. It's hoverboards. This sucks. This didn't go at all how I was hoping it was going to.

They're called icarus wings. Unironically. Touch the sun. I stand by Glide Ride. I feel good about that one. Glide ride is like, I think we just came up with a bunch of good company names. Like when we're going to bring the hoverboard back, we're going to Call it the glide ride.

I mean, you noted that the hoverboard's still around. I was at my children's talent show earlier this year. And amidst all of the terrible renditions of frozen songs and Pink Pony Club and all the other things that were going on, two kids came out on hoverboards and did a hoverboard dance to some song I'd never heard before. I think it was like a Minecraft song or something like that. This was recently? This was like a couple months ago. And they were wearing like glittery spandex like outfits.

and they killed it. Shout out to Nico and Brooks. Those kids... We're sure you're listening. We're amazing. And it gave me some songs because this is not Gen Z or millennials or anyway. This is like Jed Alpha, right?

The kids are still... Are into them? Have we come all the way back around so that they're vintage? It's like 80s glam... Millennium coverboards. Millennial cringes back, right? It's...

Well, we're all 1,000 years old is the main takeaway from this episode of Fursionist. All right. Oh, one coda to this story before we get to the version of history questions. Can I share with you what our good friend Shane Chen has been working on recently? Oh, please. Yes.

I have a clip that I would very much like to share with you. So this is a product. It is simply called Shane. Shane, a revolutionary new car embraces the laws of physics in an unexpected and inventive way. Large parallel wheels automatically shift relative. to the car's body to keep Shane in perfect balance during acceleration and braking, making it stable and safe, even at high speeds, a capability not previously possible. Suspended motors and regenerative shocks are housed in the wheels.

Maneuverability in parking are easy, thanks to two-wheel differential speed control, which eliminates the complicated steering system of today's cars. Pure electronic steering makes it a better self-driving car. Shane is practical and efficient for everyday urban and highway driving. The only way I can describe this to you is as hoverboard but spaceship. It's like a frog car. A better self-driving car. Why is there so much parking in the desert?

My question is like, well, one of my questions is, is this something he's been like building towards or is it a new idea? Like is the dream to always make a car with two wheels named after himself? I mean, I do sort of like the idea that you can go all the way back to all of his inventions. And they just get bigger and more expensive. And then they end up being a spaceship on self-balancing wheels. Like, are we thinking of an SUV version of this at some point? The three row Shane. I do like that he was like, two wheels.

That's it. That's all we need for every. Everything in our lives is just two wheels. This four-wheel stuff, that's bullshit. We need to just narrow it down to two. Did you see how easy it was to park? I mean, come on. That's a dream.

All right. Shane, I'm glad you did it. Congratulations. Dream is alive. You won the end. You send me the Kickstarter link. I want a back. I think so.

Yeah, we'll do that with this episode. All right. We need to take one more break, and then we're going to come back. Do the version history questions. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing

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Claude. a.ai slash vergecast. All right, we're back. It's time, as always, for the eight questions we ask about every product we cover on this show. Question number one, weirdly tricky in this case.

what was the best thing about hoverboards Sean you go first I like the content like you know just like all the celebrity BS and like you know people you know unboxing videos at Christmas I feel like there was just such a moment that we've talked about

of like this becoming like something you could read about or watch for days on end and that it got to like local news you know you've got local news penetration where you're just like, you know, someone in like Peoria, Illinois's local station talking about hoverboards. It was just... I do think hoverboards probably got to like 100% brand awareness at some point.

It's like Coca-Cola iPhones hoverboards. It was right up there for a while. Yeah. Not for good reasons, but it was there. That's a good answer. I like that. Andy, what do you think? I think it's like how they didn't overstay their welcome that they, I mean, like for, not my choice,

like they flamed out literally. But I feel like it, they didn't stick. around and like we didn't have to go through like multiple cycles of you know the boom and bust of it all they just came they made you know made their case for themselves and then they started exploding and then that was the end of it and yeah they're still around and you know but they're not as big as they were I think that that's more products should be like sort of like the original office where you just like three seasons and you're done and that's it like end on a high note highish you know it ended on a

note. And on a note. I'm not defending this take at all. It's just a take. It's a good take. I like it. I think for me, the underrated thing about these things is I think they got the size of the thing kind of right. Like one of my problem with all of these like last miley things, we've, you know, the electric bikes, the electric scooters, all these stuff.

They're just enormous. And they're like, I had one of the nine bot scooters for a while. And the thing weighed like 45 pounds, like, you know, three feet long, really annoying to carry. around and there was something about like you could just kind of pick up a hoverboard and carry it with you and it was it was too heavy in a way that I actually think like the year three of hoverboards they would have figured out to make it lighter and it would have been more compelling for it but like there was something about just the basic shape of the thing that I was like all right if we're going to do the last mile thing this is about the shape of it that feels right to me. All right question number two is going to be much easier because the answer is explosions. What was the worst thing about hoverboards? the content this was sort of more of the Wild West days

of like influencer marketing and we didn't really know Kendall General wasn't posting hashtag ad under her posts yet you know like that kind of stuff and it was like there was more than just the hoverboards or all these like electric surfboards and stuff and it just it was such a weird time of like

you know how much of the truth are you telling us here and you know like I Just that part of it always felt really weird to me. If I give you 51% of the celebrity hoverboard content was bought and paid for in some way. Are you going over?

Oh, over. You think? Yeah. I mean, even if I say over, but like with the caveat of like including there were probably instances where people were getting them for free, but they were probably expecting something in return at some point, you know. Yeah. Like Justin Bieber probably did not buy his Iohawk on Amazon. Yeah, definitely not. So, yeah, definitely over.

Yeah, I don't know if they were cashing big checks. No. You know, from any of these companies necessarily. But, yeah, they definitely were, there were something going on. Yeah. What about you? What was the worst? I mean, aside from the human toll and the destroyed property and, you know, all of that.

I don't know. Probably the name, I guess. It's like, you know, because we did, we, there could have been, we did have hoverboards. And then this sort of supplanted that. And now we can't talk about the concept of hoverboards without thinking of these things first as opposed to the bunch of cool. And even your children's, you know, that whole era is tainted now, too. They won't even, they'll grow up in a world never knowing the joys of back to the future.

Yeah, they're going to watch back to the future too and be like, that's not a hoverboard and you're just going to die inside. Exactly. Right there in front of that. That will be the day that I turned into the guy from the end of last crusade. So Andy's answer is the indigenerational intergenerational trauma. Yes. That's good.

All right. Well, it's the explosions. You're both wrong. Question number three. would it have been a bigger hit if Apple had made it? Could Apple have made hoverboards work? Apple would have done a secret project Titan-like project to develop their own hoverboard for 15 years and then abandon it after spending $8 billion. Would you be surprised if you learned that there was a hoverboard just embedded into the trunk of the Apple car?

No. The time there was kind of works. Specifically where you plug it in like a just got. I'm sure there was a meeting about it. The question is, could Apple have made it successful? Yeah. Oh, man. No.

Okay. Because Johnny Ive would have made it like a single plank of wood. And it wouldn't work. And it would come preloaded with just you two. The U. Yeah. Blasting out the party speakers on the side. Yeah.

Yeah, I think I'm also saying no. I think there's like it would have been safer if Apple had made it. I have a lot of faith than Apple's ability to make batteries. Save her on the battery side, maybe not on the riding side. Well, right. And industrial design probably, sure, better, but still, I think. It would have been white. It would have been, it would have been like $5,000.

And it would have not sold. Like the vision pro of hoverboards. There's the tagline. Not what we're about, I don't think. Question number four, if you could go back and make it yourself, what would you do differently? You're going back where the three of us just became hoverboard distributors. It's April of 2015. I would put a stock on it and I would call it a segue.

I don't know what I would have done differently. I think maybe I would have started with the party speaker angle. That would be like the first thing. Like this, it's not alone. It's not enough. It needs to be like more than what it is. I would have tried to make it like rugged and sporty in some way. Yeah.

Like you mentioned the they started doing the ones with like the bigger wheels, a little easier to move. I think especially it. the beginning, you never experienced this because you're a coward and never tried it. But the first, most people had a bad first experience on a hover force. And the question was if you were willing to try it like three or four or five times to kind of get the hang of it. But there's like researching this episode, I saw the same clip so many times of the people who stand on the thing and then their legs start wobbling. Because it takes a minute for your brain to realize, okay, I actually don't move my legs.

The whole point of this is that I don't move my legs. It's all like, it's an upper body thing most of the time. But they get on and you just sort of wobble back and forth and then fall off and hurt yourself spectacularly. But they had started to do things with like bigger, wider wheels, slightly more sort of stable things and try to make it like more outdoorsy. Yeah. And I just would have gone straight to that. Be like this is not a commuter tool. This is like purely fun to do.

Like shocks, like having some sort of like shocks on it to absorb the bumps. What if it could go on the sidewalk and not try to throw you off every time? Like, I would have just started there. I would have probably given it more than two wheels. And maybe take out the motors. Shane right now. Shane is crying. He's hearing about this.

I was imagining three wheels and it's like a triangle that you stand on. Now we're talking. Now we're talking. I like this. We call it the pyramid. And it just takes you along everywhere you're going. Or you know what? Eight wheels.

Whoa. Fuck it. You know? Fucker for doing eight wheels. Are we going longer or just more wheels? No, I think, you know, like in octagonal shape. Okay. And you can go omnidirectional.

So like a stop sign with wheels. Like a class eight. Like a true platform that you're on. And, you know, instead of just leaning forward backward, you can kind of go in. Did you have those things in elementary school? That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah, they had the wheels and you would sit on them and hold the handles and like launch yourself around the gym. You're talking about one of those.

Kind of. But you stand on it. But double the wheels. Yeah. And you stand on it. That's the best idea. hurt all day. I love it. I'm in. We just, we fixed it because it's a great job. Mark Cuban, get at us.

What thing about hoverboards, the experience of riding them or the things themselves, would you still want to have today? What last miley gadget would you make out of a hoverboard? Oh, I see. I mean, I wrote a lot of electric skateboards and I mean, honestly, a lot of those were trash too, but the booster board was really good. There was a thing called Zee. for a while. Z board was really good. And that was that one actually is maybe the closest analog to this because the Z board, unlike boosted and a lot of the other ones, didn't use a remote. It had foot pressure pads on the front and back of the skateboard. I don't think I ever tried that one. I mean, the first version of it was very heavy. I don't know that I ever actually rode the second one outside of maybe a

quick demo at CES. But the first one I had for a while while I lived in Queens and like rode it around. That was great. I actually really loved that. It was like self-balancing. It wasn't about. I mean, it was just a skateboard. It was like a pretty heavy like big wood deck like longboard with the motors and stuff underneath but you would you would speed up and slow down by applying pressure to the pads on either side and it was the closest that that form factor ever got to something like this that's cool that's what i was going to say to is i don't know about the self-balancing but the the sort of lean to go and lead back to stop thing i actually think is pretty intuitive it was really fun uh and and works pretty well i mean that's i think that that's key like essential to like the delight of the product why so many people were attracted to it because they

They felt like they were doing something, right? Like the machine was kind of doing it for them, but they were like balancing on this in like a way that like was unexpected. And that's so much about that sort of simple movement of your body that I think is very cool. All right. Question number six. Is there an alternate timeline in which this thing was more or even more successful? I mean, yeah, they didn't explode, I think. They would have probably continued.

I think they would have like petered out and like leveled out at a certain point. But yeah, I think minus the explosions, you could have, like, you could very well see, like, a lot of, you know, even more mainstream adoption around this. Do we think there's any world in which they get up to, like, electric bike level? Speed? No, like, penetration. Yeah. Like, if I'm to. I mean, I would argue that hoverboards had more penetration than e-bikes did in some respects.

For 10 minutes. Yeah. No, you're right. But I think what I'm thinking of is, like, there is an age that every kid gets to. to right where they're like, I want a bike. Yeah. And I think is there ever a world in which hoverboards ascend to something like that level? You'll like this.

No, not in the United States. Like if this country or any of its cities were really oriented around pedestrians versus cars, then actually, I think this thing would have had a pretty good crack at it. But like the infrastructure is just not there. Like I said, it's like a pebble on the sidewalk is just going to throw you off of this thing. And if there were more spaces where you could take these kind of like personal mobility things than, you know, on smoother surfaces to get around an actual city, then maybe there really would be. But that's just not how this country's built. Yeah. I think I agree with that.

That there is if a lot of, like the alternate timeline would start in like the 1800s in order for this thing. Or even further. Or like back to the future. Like even further into the future from now. where it's like the sort of, you know, that meme of like, this is the future we could have if only for X, you know, and it's like the glossy city with like all this stuff. Like, it would have to be something like that. Yeah. We're writing through the hyperloop tubes on our hoverboards.

Our last mile off the hyperloop tubes to go to work at the AI training facility. Yes. The futures we've lost. All right. Question number seven. Could you make hoverboards a thing again now? I think so because like, yeah, I think that we are in that era where like there's like there's no boundary in terms of like how like how much time has needed to pass before you can feel nostalgic about something. Yeah.

Like everything has just collapsed and it's like you can feel nostalgic for 2016. You can feel nostalgic for 2020 if you want to. Like it does feel like that people can reach back and take what they want and sort of cherry pick and like cobble together their own kind of like, you know, memories about what the past was and how it was better. So I do think that there could be some, you know, like give it to Benson Boone or whomever. He does a backflip off a piano onto a hoverboard at the Oscars or something like that. You are making me remember there was a run of hoverboard dance crazes during all of this that was like people doing wild synchronized hoverboard dancing. Sure. Yeah.

We could absolutely bring that back. We could absolutely bring that back. I think without a lot of trouble, we could bring that back. We could make that happen again. All we need to do is get one, like, it's probably Benson Boone now. Yeah. But if we can get Taylor Swift on a hoverboard, like, it's done. I say we call Soldier Boy.

I'm sure he's still got some stock. He's got some stock back in a warehouse somewhere. Oh, yes. He's got a closet full, just stacked to the ceiling of unopened boxes. Yes. That's what we should call him. I mean, Soldier Boy nailed it out the gate. He did.

Soldier board. Yeah. And he would easily get into business with us on this, I'm sure. So that's great. Okay, we're good. All right, new revenue stream. We made a lot of money for the verge. This is great news.

Last question. Do hoverboards belong in the version history Hall of Fame? The rules for the Hall of Fame are nebulous and vibesy, as all Hall of Fames are. But I think the rubric to the extent that it exists is just, did this thing matter? Like in the annals of technology history, were the hoverboards sort of capital I important enough to belong in the Hall of Fame. I do think that there was, you know, like, there's a universe in which, like, you didn't have hoverboards.

Maybe you didn't have e-bikes or e-scooters or e-scapeboards and all the other sort of mobility devices that have, like, been way more successful than the hoverboard ever was. Like, you needed to have this kind of, like, kitsy toy product to come first and also show us, you know, sort of like the capacity that China has in terms of manufacturing. products and seizing it upon things that have become popular in other countries and just like flooding the zone with this kind of stuff. And then changing their factories the next week to make like e-cigarettes or whatever. Right, exactly, on a dime.

Yeah. So, yeah, I do feel like that there is like a version like, you know, like the hover, we needed to have like the boondoggle of the hoverboard in order to get like these much more utilitarian e-mobility devices that are actually last mile devices that are worthwhile and but it also it's frustrating because we learned

nothing from the hoverboard as well because those products all exploded and flamed out and did horrible things to people and we didn't learn

from the hoverboard that we need to make these things safer and there need to be safety standards around the construction of these batteries especially

and I wish that we had. Yeah like part of that explanation makes me think that no it doesn't belong it's like saying the pitcher

who taught the other pitcher how to be better than him belongs in the Hall of Fame. And it's like, I'm not sure that's right. But I do think everything you just said is true. And also, it was such a moment and it burned so bright. That was the thing that really came back to me in prepping for this was it was so huge.

Hillary Clinton was supposed to be the president. Let's just keep that in mind. That year, that's what all of us were thinking as the hoverboard was gaining traction. We're like, first woman president, hoverboard. Nope, that's not the world we live. I think we're going to put it in the hall of. of Fame just because Shane Chen needs a win. We're doing it for Shane. You don't want to put

the Shane in there? Well, so here's the question, though, is are we putting the Sheik Robotics S-1? Or are we putting the hover tracks? We're putting a vague recreation of a patent application in there? But like the cartoon version of a hoverboard. Yeah. Goes in the Hall of Fame. I think so. All right. I like it. I feel good about it. All right. That is it. That's it for the show. Thank you both for being here. This was very fun. We're going to go red hoverboards and see who gets injured first. As ever, you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube. You can listen to them wherever you get podcasts. And the best way to support all of this and everything we do is to subscribe to the verge.com. That's it. Thank you so much for being here. See you next time.

Version History is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Eric Gomez, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Studio support from Chris Shirtleff. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. be sure to subscribe to the new version history podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive.