Lexus set out to prove its credentials with the younger crowd – not its sweet spot, affluent, quietly confident buyers – with the launch of a mini movie of what it calls the Slide. A hover board that appears to not just live up to our Back to the Future II dreams but goes way beyond. At least stylistically. And better yet, it is more science than science fiction.

A bamboo and carbon fibre skateboard, emitting wisps of smoke, levitates an inch or two off of what appears to be a concrete surface. No wheels in sight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwSwZ2Y0Ops

A number of other shorter clips were released espousing Lexus’ positioning of Amazing in Motion and how “difficult requires time, impossible takes a little longer”. Whilst this project does exactly that, social media was abuzz with boffins claiming that it was a hoax and VFX trickery. That the only way it could work was the presence of special stuff under the concrete surface of the skate park specially created for the shoot. As someone put it, “it can’t be pure concrete in the video; there has to be something magnetic there as well”.

Well how does it really work?

Magnets. That’s the short version. The long version means steeling yourself for a light dose of physics. Anybody who wants to know about superconductors and magnets, which combine to repel the force of gravity and lift an object—like, say, a fancy skateboard and its rider—above the ground, go here.

For the rest of us who just wanna believe and will be writing to Santa Claus this year with an extra-large stocking at the end of our beds, turn the volume up and play it again.