Image Credit: BoatsToGo
This is no longer something I can continue to be complicit in.
As the Tech & Gadgets editor of CraveOnline, I have watched as the very concept of what constitutes a hoverboard has changed. After writing numerous news articles over the past few years each time a developer has claimed it’s FINALLY made a functioning hoverboard, and being routinely disappointed by them having not really made anything even closely resembling Marty McFly’s method of transportation in Back to the Future Part 2, eventually everyone lost their minds and started to refer to these things as hoverboards:
I needn’t explain to you why this isn’t actually a hoverboard, as it’s visually apparent why this isn’t the case. It has wheels, for one thing. Hoverboards don’t require wheels because, as their name suggests, they hover. That is their predominant function. This machine’s inability to hover therefore ensures that it isn’t actually a hoverboard, but rather a Segway with an increased probability of its user falling down while riding it.
Yet mostly everyone has complied with the notion that these are now classified as hoverboards and I have reluctantly joined them, partially because “Two-Wheeled Sideways Electric Skateboard Thing” isn’t good for our Search Engine Optimization, along with the additional fact that I was fighting a losing battle. I was standing against a tidal wave of tweens happily going about their lives branding miscellaneous modes of transport hoverboards, and I was beginning to resemble an old man shouting at a cloud as a result.
But a new addition to the “hoverboard” family has proven to be the final straw: the Hoverboard Cart.
Image Credit: BoatsToGo
The Hoverboard Cart (pictured above) is an attachment that slots onto the back of a hoverboard, in order to allow the user to sit on a beach chair and happily glide around their neighborhood like the ultimate slacker. It looks as ridiculous as you’d imagine, but that’s not what I take issue with; I take issue with the now flagrant misuse of the word hoverboard.
I made my peace with calling the two-wheeled electric things hoverboards, but I cannot in all good faith refer to this chair strapped to some wheels as a hoverboard. Even the title of the vehicle contradicts itself, as a hoverboard cannot simultaneously be a cart. In a distant future, we may see hovercarts, but a board and a cart are two entirely different modes of transportation. We all must know this, so why is there an insistence that we refer to this vehicle as a Hoverboard Cart? When will this madness end?
You can take a look at the non-hovering cart in action below:
Though all three $69 models of the cart are currently sold out, you can find out more about it right here.
