Version History: Hoverboards

Welcome to The Verge Cast, 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 watched 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. I also 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.

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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.

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All right, we're back. Let's talk hoverboards. Andy Hawkins is here. Hi, Andy. Sean O'Kane is here. 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've 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 coworkers 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? None. None at all. Zero regrets about that. Actually, I feel better about it today. Every day that goes by, I feel even better about it. 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 like 800 square foot apartment. I don't have any room to ride this thing. I'm going to take it down to the street. First mistake. I was like very early in the hoverboard world at this point. So I didn't know how any of this worked. 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 ridden, have not stuck with it. Okay. Expertise would be a word I wouldn't use. Like, would you peak Sean on a hoverboard? Would you roll around this set? Oh, no. And feel comfortable not destroying things? Without breaking all of the cameras? No. Give me a wide open space. You know, put me on an airport runway. Oh, yeah. I could probably cruise. A recently paved airport runway. I could probably cruise pretty well. Okay. That comes for something. 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 the entirety of the hoverboard craze. You were both covering it a lot.

is my memory of it. 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. 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 thinking they were cool. To me, it's also like a harbinger of what was to come with the trade war stuff that we've been in over the last couple years of rapid production.

domestic manufacturing in China, and it was a deeper story than I remembered. All the safety implications. That was sort of where I came into the story was once they started exploding and catching on fire was when I was like, oh, this is more than just your average 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 last mile.

Everyone was obsessed with this idea that 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. 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 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 it's weird times. I still have a bunch of those things at my house. 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. It's a weird thing that we call them. 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 professional like a professional influencer. This thing would have numbers on TikTok. Seriously. And like it was like we needed to have the celebrities be the ones to like introduce us to this 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. OK. So this is 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 through it so on one parallel history we have this guy named shane chen who is an inventor uh lives in the pacific northwest has been into like rideably things for forever uh 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 uh 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 you push them forward and it goes forward you push them backwards and goes backwards you push one and pull one and it turns and so that that was like his big technical change. He set up a Kickstarter for this thing. He has said since that he had this idea in 2011. Patents it in 2013. Does the Kickstarter in 2013. Raises a little over $80,000 from, I think it was 162 backers on Kickstarter, which is fine. Numbers. Congratulations. See how he did it? It hit its goal. You're getting it on the ground floor on hoverboards. You're living that billionaire lifestyle. That's what you want to be. You want to be one of those original seed investors. Well, our boy Shane Chen might have different feelings than that. But let me just, this is the most 2013 Kickstarter video ever. So let me just play you a short clip from the Kickstarter.

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 port shenanigans uh 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 Chic 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 inside of this one factory. Chic Robotics is one of them. They start making what they call self-balancing scooters that look a lot like our buddy Shane's Harbor 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 Chic Robotics. So Chic 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 have people ride them around. And they become this 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 that was, I think, CES's 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 getting people to meet and they just have a fun idea. And they're like, and this thing, 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 when 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 so okay so chic makes this thing uh and their version of the story is relatively straightforward like chic makes the thing finds a bunch of distributors those distributors put logos and stickers on it and they 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 the thing that we have in the United States looks more like that one from Sheik than it does the hover tracks that Shane Chen made the year before. And then, whatever happened...

Everybody else ripped off their intellectual property. 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 when they first came to the U.S., which was pretty quick, they came, my recollection at least, there was not one product that showed up and then a bunch of knockoffs. It was all knockoffs from day one, which was just weird. And they all had the weirdest names. It was always some sort of bizarre combination of English words that didn't really seem like they made sense together, like car, wind, wheels.

Another sort of harbinger of what was to come. I feel like this is a proto version of the Alphabet Soup Amazon mess that we have today of like, I'm going to buy an electric toothbrush. This one that's called X9Z2B Free looks good. I will say, to the hoverboards 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 take this for you.

This is a Swagwick. This is a Funky Duck. This is Hovercraft. This is the Epico Classic. This is the Mono Rover 2. I'm Carl Lifestyle. I walk. The Hoverboard 360. This particular model is called the Lee Ray self-balancing scooter. They also call it the Dream Walker. Oh, Dream Walker. That's ominous. My favorite version of this story is, I believe it was Funky Duck sent one of their scooters to Soulja Boy, which is a very 2015 sentence to say out loud. And then like days later.

soldier boy starts selling a board i believe it's called the soldier board yeah 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 put 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 companies 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 do all kinds of stuff on Funky Duck 2. 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, 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 Isle Hawk, both of which I guess are distributing Sheik Robotics, which may or may not be knocking off the hover tracks. This is like-

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, remember? It was just sort of like, you know, artful 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 dangling them in 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 uh i yearn for that in his like full john adams garb love that i don't know that's a really that's a good one he's very famous and i love his music unironically john mayer justin bieber okay justin bieber uh 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 tell 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.

I mean, is it him? Well, look at those pants. Look at the shorts. And then he falls off. 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 hair era. It had to have been right after that. Okay. I'm a truther. I'm not going to lie. You don't think it was Beeps? No. Beeps, body double. Did a lot of work in 2015 on Hoverboard. It was G-Mani. G-Mani.

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. It wasn't even a good vine. There's 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 a national news moment. Millions of people watching J.R. Smith just like potentially injure himself all the way to the locker room.

Nicki Minaj, Nina Ogdal, the model, David Ortiz, Kareem Benzema, the soccer player, Skrillex, who became very well known for his hoverboarding. That's the most 2015. 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 Jimmies. Jimmies and Jameses and all of them. And so 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, Bieber posts in March, and then we spend kind of May, June, July, August culturally obsessed with Harvard boards. 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 year the holidays came around, it was insane. Yeah. That, like, every kid was, like,

I want one of these so bad. That's the only thing that I want, mom and dad. And it was like, it was like rushing to get wherever you could get one, people fighting over them at Black Friday deals. And there were absolutely no problems with these things sitting under flammable Christmas trees. 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 remember any of the early versions of this story? I remember being very like...

You know, panic, panic. Like, this is a problem. Because, yes, they started exploding. They were catching on fire. There were some deaths, I think, associated with it. Like, it was bad. Yeah, and it's useful to remember that these things are huge. Which is like, it's not like if even your phone battery exploded. Because this is just before the Note 7 shenanigans. Like, it's really like... We were actually so prepared for the Note 7 because of hoverboards. So right. This is actually, hoverboards were learning moments for me in multiple ways. One was, this is where I first learned what UL certification is. Yes, same. Because we spent 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 that was a big one. Yeah, UL certification is another thing. One of those you're like, I wish I never needed to learn about this. I'm glad it exists, and I hope I never think about it again. Okay, I have a couple of clips I would like to play for you of hoverboard explosions, because what are we here for if it's not hoverboard explosions? Hoverboards are red hot in more ways than one. 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!

Well, and as soon as that came down, like everywhere... started banning them, right? 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. I just remember that they were like, they took, you remember at the time, there were all those MTA sort of helpful hint things on the subway with the sort of simply drawn figure people. Like the cartoon people. Yeah, and they had ones for the hoverboards. They were always like, don't bring this on board. I think they're still up there. Probably on some, yes. And I remember, 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, 20 years, and I don't think I ever saw anybody. I think I saw some people carrying them. I never saw anyone use one on the 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 riding the hoverboard? How does that work? See, that I would...

I would give somebody a dollar for that on the subway. Yeah, that's showtime. Especially if you can spin up through the bars. We haven't even talked about the ones that have built-in speakers and lights. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. No, this is the right time because this was the other thing. It was time for Funky Duck 2, baby. There you go. At this point, 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 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 an idea. Yet somehow deeply appropriate. This thing is so Gary. I mean, it already was essentially a party speaker on wheels. So making it a party speaker on wheels was like, yeah, that tracks. I remember seeing 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. Top reports. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Blinds.com. Sometimes you don't realize how important quality window coverings are until you do something about it. All of a sudden, that blinding light you were dealing with every morning goes away and you think, why didn't I get those blinds replaced sooner? With Blinds.com, you can go full DIY if you want or bring in licensed and vetted pros to install the exact lines your room needs. And right now, you can get $50 off when you spend $500 or more. They have a huge variety of style options at prices that fit any budget. And you can get samples shipped to your door fast and for free. If you need help picking the right style, just book a free consultation with one of Blinds.com's award-winning design experts. That means no awkward home visits.

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It all kind of goes sideways. Everything's exploding. Like the hoverboard was sideways. 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. It was really interesting because I went back and was looking at the beginning of the story. There was this run of people buying them 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 uh 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 more either more slowly or reverse it uh 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, like, take more care of the batteries and start to actually, like, 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? 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 these fights forever about these patents and then just kind of decided, eh. Our core system does not move nearly at the speed of sort of viral.

viral anything, let alone viral product. It was never going to be something they could sort out in time for it to matter for this product. And 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, I think the thing that there's no coming back from was all the safety stuff, right? 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. And there's just no coming back from that. But I do wonder, because if you rewind to the beginning of 2015, 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 JetSki, where it's like, there are lots of ways to move around on the water. There's only one JetSki. And if you could have been the one to come in and be like, okay, screw Iohawk, 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 it 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, Iowa Hawker or Mark Cuban's thing or whatever it was that could have emerged eventually had there been more time, I think. And 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 because there was that disruption in sort of like right in midstream as this thing was getting going, it kind of prevented it from happening. I think that 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, electric scooter, electric skateboard or something like this. But I think people started to realize in that sort of hangover moment of like, does this really actually work like that? I mean, you can take these things down like a sidewalk, but like if there's a bump, you're kind of doomed, 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 the studio space? Like it really is a thing that only works that well on like the shiny floors of Justin Bieber's mansion 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 changing that a little bit, but it's tricky when you're dealing with self-balancing stuff especially. And 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 I think the most competent version of that that we've ever seen is eventually the Segway Ninebot one that really has, it's essentially a shrunk down Segway with no stock to lean on with your hands. And that is 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.

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, you know, it was like John Ralphio from Parks and Rec or something like that. Like, you know, it was meant to take the signal that this is like an unserious person. And so that's, I think it quickly sort of became associated with less of the utility and more of sort of like the jokey. 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. 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. And this was never going to solve that problem. Yeah. I mean, again, you go back to sort of the world at that time. It's like you were talking about. We were like, OK, 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 amazing to me that none of the car companies tried to buy Humber tracks. Because that's what they did with the scooter companies, right? They saw 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 GM swoop in and buy one of these. I'm dying thinking about the 30-page slide deck that someone prepared for Mary Barra at GM of like, here's why we should acquire Iowa Hawks.

And they start exploding and she's like, get out. The future of transportation is the hover tracks. I'm going to invest a billion dollars in crews 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. 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 piece. 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 um 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 uh back to the future the date in fact of the future so you know there were all these people who were like gearing themselves up to be like all retrospective about back to the future and the hoverboard and uh 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 Arx Pax, I think was the one that was actually behind that. And 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- They were science projects. Yeah, exactly. You can just take it anywhere. Yeah, there was one 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 Arca 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 a small airboat. And so there are all these things. And the big one that I remember was there was this 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 stuff 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 craziest 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 gonna 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 Sheffer? 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. You're welcome. And it was like, you know, again, it was another one of these things where it was very scientific ceremony. 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 uh you know hovers over a base of some other material it was essentially that but they had balanced it out well and they'd 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 insane 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 um 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 let me i have a clip of that video which if memory serves was one of The Verge's most successful and viewed video ever. Still to this day, I think. Yeah, it's 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 coming off it just makes it look even worse. Nothing about this is real, but it's sick. I mean, it looks like it's on the ground. There it does, yeah. 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 was working. So I remember him telling me that he was struggling with that part of it. And 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've been the Hendo one. But 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. I like that you wrote a hoverboard, but you've never written a hoverboard. Yes, I know. That's one of the weird things about me.

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. They're all about magnetic levitation 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 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 it became a good shorthand for it. And again, like I said earlier, if you're not looking at what somebody is doing and you're 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 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. Rollie board. No bad ideas. Go. Glide ride. Glide ride. Can we just call it a scooter? Spin doctor. Yeah, there you go. Glide ride is actually very good. It's nothing, but it's very good. Spin doctor is 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. Tilt-o-whirl.

This is all making me like hoverboard. Ass blaster. You followed your ass. Zoom scooter. Foot. There's probably something with foot, right? Foot. Foot wheel. Foot mobile. That's going to get a whole other demographic. Yeah. 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 it. 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 live ride. 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 a Minecraft song. This was recently? This was a couple months ago. And they were wearing glittery spandex outfits and they killed it.

Shout out to Nico and Brooks. Those kids- We're sure you're listening. Were amazing. And it gave me some solace because this is not Gen Z or millennials or anything. This is like Gen 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 millennial coverboards. It's a cringe. Millennial cringe is back, right? It's- Well, we're all a thousand years old. That's the main takeaway from this episode of Version History. All right. Let's, oh, one coda to this story before we get to the Version 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 and 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 building towards or is it a new idea? 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. Are we going to get an SUV version of this? I do like that he was like, two wheels, that's it. That's all we need for everything in our lives is just two wheels. This four-wheel stuff, that's bullshit.

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. The dream is alive. You won. You sent me the Kickstarter link. I want it 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 and do the virtual history questions. We'll be right back.

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Sean, you go first. The content, just all the celebrity BS and people unboxing videos at Christmas. I feel like there was just such a moment that we've talked about of this becoming... something you could read about or watch for days on end. And that it got to local news. You've got local news penetration where you're just like someone in Peoria, Illinois' local station talking about hoverboards. I do think hoverboards probably got to 100% brand awareness at some point. It's like Coca-Cola, iPhones, hoverboards. It was right up there for a while. 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. I mean, like, not by choice. Like, they flamed out, literally. But I feel like 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 their case for themselves. And then they started exploding. And then that was the end of it. And, yeah, they're still around. But they're not as big as they were. I think that 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.

And on a high note. High-ish. It ended on a note. I'm not defending this take at all. It's just a take. It's a good take. 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 mile things we've you know the electric bikes the electric scooters all these 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 figure out how 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 it 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, you know, Kendall Jenner 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're 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 iHawk on Amazon. Yeah, definitely not. So yeah, definitely over. I don't know if they were.

cashing big checks, you know, from any of these companies necessarily. But yeah, they definitely were, there was something going on. Yeah. 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, 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- 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 2 and be like, that's not a hoverboard, and you're just going to die inside. Exactly. That will be the day that I turn into the guy from the end of Last Crusade. And his answer is the intergenerational trauma. Yes. That's good. All right, well, it's the explosion. 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. There was a space specifically where you plug it in. I'm sure there was. 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. Yeah, it would be 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 in Apple's ability to make batteries. Well, safer on the battery side, maybe not on the riding side. Well, right. And industrial design probably, sure, better, but still. Yeah, it would have been white. It would have been like five grand and it would have not sold. Like the Vision Pro of hoverboards. Here'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. Maybe I would have started with the party speaker angle. That would have been the first thing. Alone, it's not enough. It needs to be more than what it is. I would have tried to make it rugged and sporty in some way. You mentioned that they started doing the ones with the bigger wheels, a little easier to move. I think, especially at 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 course. 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. 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 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 is crying. 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. Are we going longer or just more wheels? No, I think, you know, like in octagonal shape. And you can go omnidirectional.

Like a true platform that you're on. And, you know, instead of just leaning forward or backward, you can kind of go. 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. But you stand on it. But double the wheels. Yeah. And you stand on it. That's the best idea I've heard all day. I love it. I mean, we just, we fixed it. 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 rode a lot of electric skateboards. And, I mean, honestly, a lot of those were trash, too. But the Boosted Board was really good. There was this thing called Zboard for a while. Zboard was really good. And that one actually is maybe the closest analog to this because the Zboard, 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. Was it self-balancing? It wasn't balanced. 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 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 too. I don't know about the self-balancing, but the sort of lean to go and lean back to stop thing, I actually think is pretty intuitive. It was really fun. And works pretty well. I mean, I think that's key, like essential to like the delight of the product, why so many people were attracted to it because 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 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. 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, right, where they're like, I want to bike. 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, then, 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 is 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. 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 riding 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, yeah, I think that we are in that era where there's no boundary in terms of how much time has needed to pass before you can feel nostalgic about something. Everything has just collapsed. And it's like you can feel nostalgic for 2016. You can feel nostalgic for 2020 if you want to.

It does feel like 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. 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. 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. 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. Nothing but soldiers. Yes. That's what we should call him. I mean, Soldier Boy nailed it out the gate. He did. Soldier Board. And he would easily get into business with us on this, I'm sure. So, that's great. Okay, we're good. We made a lot of money for this episode. This is great news. Last question. Do hoverboards belong in the Virgin History Hall of Fame? The rules of the Hall of Fame are nebulous and vibes-y, 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 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 skateboards 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 kitschy 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 on 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 e-cigarettes or whatever. Right, exactly, on a dime. So yeah, I do feel like that there is a version, we needed to have the boondoggle of the hoverboard in order to get these much more utilitarian e-mobility devices that are actually last mile devices that are worthwhile. But 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. 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. Like 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. It was like, first woman president, hoverboard. Nope, that's not the world we live in. I think we're going to put it in the Hall of Fame just because Shane Chen needs a win. We're doing it for Shane.

You don't want to put the chain in there? Well, so here's the question, though, is are we putting the Sheik Robotics S1 or are we putting the Hover Tracks? We're putting a vague recreation of a patent application in there. Like the cartoon version of a hoverboard 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. Thank you. This was very fun. We're going to go ride hoverboards and see who gets injured first. As ever, you can watch all 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 TheVirge.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 Barkin. Studio support from Chris Shurtleff. 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. Support for today's episode comes from Delta, official airline of the National Women's Soccer League. Traveling is basically magic. It creates opportunities, it fosters understanding, it expands horizons, it connects people and communities to each other and to their own potential. Those are the values that drive Delta. With up to 5,500 daily Delta and Delta Connection flights to more than 300 destinations on six continents, Delta is committed to helping you explore your world. Whatever gives you the travel bug, Delta is here to help you get there. Visit delta.com for more info. Delta, wherever the journey takes you.

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