Shallow Thoughts: Hoverboard / The Swag Board
This is apparently a cool way of getting around.
This terrible device goes by many names: the Swag Board, the Hoverboard, the Swagway, the Hands Free Segway, the Self Balancing Electric Scooter. It appears that these devices are priced in the 200–600 dollar price range, depending on the make and model. There is a sudden surge of these products on the market, without one definitive brand name winning market supremacy yet as other gimmicky modes of transportation have had in the past (I’m looking at you Razor). I have been noticing these more and more lately, and I worry that these expensive toys might actually have some staying power. What they are is simple. You stand on the electric board, and then you simply lean to control the speed and direction of the device. What is harder to understand is when this could possibly be practical. In a remotely crowded setting disaster would shortly ensue, and similarly, a patch of uneven sidewalk could prove extremely problematic (notice how flat the ground is in any photo or demo video of these products).
Basically you are limited to using them to move along at a slow speed on a very flat surface in the company of friends, who you hope are marveling at your “futuristic” and badass new toy. It’s hard to imagine a Swag Board really having that desired effect, unless your friends happen to be in the 13–16 year old age demographic. Now that I think about this, I may be coming at this from the wrong angle, this might be a near perfect consumer good, in the fact that there is a large market of teens out there just waiting to drop loads of disposable money on a fairly useless product. It’s not like previous generations haven’t found their own creative ways to waste money. Luckily I don’t have a picture of my own twelve-year-old self zooming by on a pair of Heely’s, or I’d be compelled to share it for this article.
If you’re not familiar with how Heely’s work, here’s your crash course. For some reason wheels were inserted into the heels of shoes, at which point a gullible child would pay too much money for said shoes, and then coast around on their heels imagining that this somehow looked cool. As stupid as Heely’s were, I will admit that I got some real enjoyment out of them. Just like the swag board there was almost no practical application for them. You needed room to coast, so crowded settings inherently were out of the question, and uneven terrain or bumps could lead to a wipeout. The thing that made Heely’s cool back then though (to me, and a small segment of other twelve year olds) was the fact that it offered a sense of control and originality. You had a way to get around that was your own, it was inherently different than what older generations did. And in that sense, maybe there is a little bit of redemption for the Swag Board. Though it’s pretty damn hard to understand why a grown man would ever want to be seen on one.
