Hands off our hover boards!
Banned by elf ’n’ safety, it’s the world’s most reviled toy —but Robert Hardman is an unlikely convert (even if he came a cropper)
JUST weeks ago, it was widely tipped as the No1 must-have Christmas toy. By the end of December, it was right up there alongside King Herod, the Grinch and Captain Hook as one of our top Christmas villains. Has any toy ever given rise to quite so much outrage as the poor hoverboard?
Pedants might object to the fact that it doesn’t actually hover. Rather, it carries its rider on two small wheels attached to a footplate from which you adjust speed and direction with the soles of your feet. But that is the least of its worries.
Depending on which reports you read, it will either break your leg, burn down your house or bring your aircraft crashing out of the sky.
The Metropolitan Police — and every other force for that matter — has banned it from highways and pavements (on the grounds that this is an unlicensed motorised vehicle). Three weeks ago, a North London schoolboy riding a hoverboard was killed in a collision with a bus.
Almost every retailer, from the wholesome John Lewis to anything-goes Amazon, has withdrawn it from sale following incidents of exploding lithium batteries underneath the Christmas tree.
Paul Hodkinson of Kent ended up with a £25,000 repair bill after his kitchen was torched by a hoverboard.
There have been angry complaints in Parliament and the Local Government Association has weighed in. Don’t even ask the health ’n’ safety mob for their thoughts unless you have a few hours to spare.
On top of all that, the hoverboard has earned the ultimate accolade of royal ostracism. New signs have just been erected in Windsor Great Park warning that the boards are ‘strictly prohibited’. A Crown Estate spokeswoman explains that the notices have gone up on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service.
ACCORDING to the CPS, you may only ride your hoverboard on private land — and only with the permission of the landowner. Elsewhere, you are committing an offence under section 72 of the Highway Act 1835 — or the 1984 Roads (Scotland) Act.
Blimey. You can bring down the banking system with impunity, sunshine, but don’t even think about riding that mobile tea tray to the sweetshop . . .
And if you’re hoping to take your hoverboard somewhere more user-friendly — like the U.S., where you can ride it on the pavement — then think again. Because most airlines now refuse to carry them, either in the hold or in the cabin, for fear of an onboard explosion.
Last week, Hollywood star Russell Crowe — who can be a bit of a human lithium battery himself, given his catalogue of tantrums — hauled his entire family off a Virgin Australia flight after staff refused to allow his children to check in their hoverboards.
Who would want to handle public relations for the British Association Of Hoverboard Manufacturers? Except there isn’t one. Every hoverboard ever made seems to have been produced by an opaque assortment of factories in China. And Trading Standards Officers have found that tens of thousands are simply not up to scratch.
So, given that the entire Establishment seems to be bearing down on these contraptions, we might conclude that they are merely a passing fad which has well and truly passed.
Well, think again. Because the more that officialdom declares war on the hoverboard, the more that yoof culture is going to embrace it.
The only reason these gizmos became popular in the first place is that cool celebrities like Justin Bieber and Lily Allen were filmed riding — and falling off — them. And the more they are outlawed, the cooler they become.
So I have come to see what all the fuss is about. And, at the risk of sounding like a cringeworthy middle-aged hipster-Dad trying to ‘get down with da kids’, I’m afraid I’m on the side of the hoverboarders.
Because these things are not just great fun. They are considerably less of a menace to the general public than, say, a skateboard. And compared to rollerbladers or cyclists barging their way along pavements and footpaths, give
me a hoverboarder any time. Though they are said to have a top speed of 12mph, it’s pretty hard to outpace a jogger.
Having read countless cautionary tales of adults who have bought one for a child, had a sneaky go and then ended up in A&E, I’m not going to make that mistake.
Instead, I have come to what, as far as I can gather, is Britain’s first hoverboarding school. Essex entrepreneurs Duncan Clapman and Paul lane have been running Ride n Fly since last summer, taking a range of (non-exploding) hoverboards to country shows, school fetes and Scout jamborees around the South-East.
They also hire school and public halls around the Home Counties for group tuition at £10-15 an hour. They have already organised teenage roller-discos for hoverboarders and have plans for a hoverboard five-a-side football tournament.
Except they never call them hoverboards. ‘That’s just caught on through the media,’ says Paul, 34. ‘Most people who use them call them balance boards.’
I’m not so sure. That sounds more like a toy for toddlers than a musthave mode of teen transport.
The duo have no doubt this is the beginning, rather than the end.
‘It’s true that there have been problems with prototypes and cheap imports but we are really only at the penny farthing stage with these things,’ says Duncan, 35, a father of two and a former IT salesman from Chigwell.
‘As long as they are built properly and used sensibly, they’re just a lot of fun.’ The penny farthing, of course, was the wonderfully precarious Victorian precursor to the modern bicycle. You certainly had further to fall on one of those. At least a hoverboard is only a few inches off the floor.
I have come for a trial run at an Essex country park near Fairlop. Before I get going, Duncan gives me a helmet, elbow pads and some basic tuition. ‘You wouldn’t put on a pair of skis and set off without a lesson, so why do people expect to shoot off on one of these the first time round?’
He asks me to step on his toes, which seems a bit mean on him, but he doesn’t flinch. You automatically tread gently when you stand on someone else’s feet.
‘That’s the sort of pressure you need to apply to the footpad,’ he explains.
As a rule, he reckons most people can pick this up in ten minutes, though the older you are the longer it can take. As for weight, most boards can take anything up to 18st (phew).
The problem, apparently, is not so much fatties as youngsters who lack the weight to send signals to the footpads. ‘If they’re very light, we might put a backpack on them,’ says Duncan. He helps me on board, supporting me as if he were escorting a pensioner on to an ice rink. And then off we go.
UnlIkE skiing, it’s not a case of ‘bend ze knees’. You just press slightly forward — almost as if testing the water in a bath — and the thing trundles along. Dig your heels in and you start going backwards.
After ten minutes, I am riding unaided. After 20, I am doing 360- degree turns. I switch from a standard £250 board called an AP2 to a snazzier £350 AP1, with more sensitive footpads and a little more speed. After half an hour, I am becoming a tedious show-off, riding with my hands in my pockets, striking silly poses and reversing at jogging speed. At which point, I finally go flat on my backside.
It’s not too painful. I am fairly well-padded. And at least I haven’t done a Tom and Jerry-style ‘splat’ — like boxer Mike Tyson when he tried out his daughter’s new hoverboard the other day. His pratfall has now had more than 1.5 million hits on YouTube.
So if this is the penny farthing, where do we go from here with the hoverboard?
The gadget was only invented in 2013, and uses similar technology to those (much more expensive) two-wheeled Segway electric scooters you sometimes see in airports and shopping centres.
There is already a gizmo called an AirWheel, an electric unicycle, on the market.
But the next ‘big thing’ is a device like a skateboard, with a single motorised central wheel poking up through the middle, rather like riding a spinning top.
Paul and Duncan have already ordered a prototype from China and expect to see it in the spring. Given China’s ability to pilfer a design and reproduce fake copies within hours, there will doubtless be thousands of them on Christmas lists come December.
They don’t even have a name yet. Perhaps they should avoid one. After all, it would, at least, make it harder to ban them.