Will Marty McFly's hoverboard ever become real?

In the 1989 film Back to the Future Part II, Marty McFly glides down the street on a hoverboard in the year 2015. That year is now more than ten years behind us. Will that hoverboard ever become real?

In a way, it already exists. In 2015, the car maker Lexus made a board float using superconductors: materials that, cooled with liquid nitrogen to -197 degrees Celsius, stay hanging at a fixed height above magnets. That board only floated above a special track of magnets in a skatepark in Barcelona, and the nitrogen had to be topped up about every ten minutes. In 2019, the Frenchman Franky Zapata crossed the English Channel in 22 minutes on his Flyboard Air, a board with jet engines that run on kerosene, with one fuel stop halfway. Floating anywhere, silently and without fuel, like Marty: that is not yet possible.

Now a former NASA engineer claims to have found a force that makes an object move without fuel and without a magnetic track, using only electric fields. Even if the claim is correct, the force is currently enough to lift about 1 gram. For someone weighing 75 kilograms on a 5-kilogram board, roughly 80,000 times more is needed. No independent lab has measured the force yet either. Still, the story is worth telling, because it shows how to test such an extraordinary claim.

Who is Charles Buhler?

Charles Buhler worked for NASA for many years as a specialist in static electricity. He made sure that electrical discharges did not damage the space shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS) and the Hubble Space Telescope, and he helped set up the electrostatics lab at the Kennedy Space Center. With aerospace engineer Andrew Aurigema, he founded the company Exodus Propulsion Technologies in Titusville, Florida. The company is independent of NASA.

What does Exodus claim?

A rocket pushes gas out of the back and is pushed forward as a result. In space there is nothing to push against, so without fuel to expel you cannot move forward. Exodus says it has a device that still gives a push without expelling anything.

The device is made of light materials such as Teflon and copper tape, with metal plates of different shapes. The makers apply a voltage of 30,000 to 40,000 volts to them. An electric field pulls on the surfaces of a charged object. According to Buhler and Aurigema, because of the uneven shape of the plates this pull is stronger on one side than on the other, so a net push remains in one direction. They call this the Exodus effect. In 2022 they received a patent for it in the United States. A patent protects an invention, but it is not proof that the invention works.

According to the company, the best devices between 2016 and 2020 pushed with one hundred-thousandth of their own weight. At the end of 2020, the team built its own vacuum chamber, a sealed room from which the air is pumped out, as in space. After that, the force is said to have grown step by step, until in 2023 it reached a push slightly greater than the weight of the part that produces the force. Buhler calls that "one g": enough to lift that part against gravity.

That sounds big, but the numbers are small. According to Buhler, that part weighs about 760 milligrams and produces a force of about 10 millinewtons. That is roughly the weight of 1 gram. The whole test set-up weighs 30 to 40 grams and so cannot lift itself. The team says it has tested almost two thousand versions, with pendulums, scales, rotating set-ups and measurements in the vacuum chamber, and in doing so has ruled out air flow, magnetism and measurement errors. In some tests the force remained after the power was switched off, according to Buhler. He himself says that the theory lags behind the experiments.

Why physicists are cautious

Charges within one device always pull and push each other equally hard, in opposite directions. If you add up all those forces inside one closed device, they cancel each other out. An electrically charged object therefore cannot push itself forward. It can pull or push on something in its surroundings: the air, the walls of the chamber, the cables or the Earth. That is why the claim is so remarkable. If it is correct, then either the device pushes against something that physics does not yet know, or the law of conservation of momentum, one of the best-tested laws in physics, does not hold everywhere.

There are known explanations that can imitate such measurements. For decades there have been so-called lifters: light structures of foil and wire under high voltage. A study commissioned by NASA in 2004 explained their force by charged particles colliding with air molecules and so creating an air flow, an ion wind. Exodus says the force also remains in the vacuum chamber, but even there a little air always remains. In addition, a charged object keeps exerting force on its surroundings as long as the charge stays on it, even when the power is off.

The history of the EmDrive shows how hard such measurements are. The British engineer Roger Shawyer proposed that fuel-free drive in 2001, and in 2016 a NASA team reported a small force. Researchers at the Technical University of Dresden found in 2021 that this force was a measurement error: the device heated up, which deformed the mounting on the scale. With a better set-up, the force disappeared.

Buhler has his own theory about how the effect works. The physicist David Chester looked at that theory and saw problems in it, but could not give an ordinary explanation for all the measurements together either. There is not yet an article in a scientific journal in which other researchers can check the measurement data. And no independent lab has measured the effect with its own equipment.

What is happening now

Exodus is looking for funding and partners. In April 2026, the company held a meeting for physicists and investors in New York, and at the end of August, Buhler and Aurigema presented their latest tests at a conference on alternative propulsion. The team is building its own research lab with a larger vacuum chamber, big enough for people to stand in. Buhler has invited other labs to repeat the tests in their own vacuum chambers.

The big goal is a test in space. There is no air there and there are no walls for the device to push against. If a satellite with such a device on board moves, that is the strongest evidence. There is not yet a date or partner for such a flight.

What does this mean for the road to the singularity?

Spaceflight is all about fuel. A satellite that runs out of fuel for steering slowly drops out of its orbit or has to be abandoned. A drive that needs only electricity, which can come from solar panels, could keep satellites working much longer. Exodus is therefore aiming first at small course corrections for satellites, not at rockets or hoverboards.

Whether the Exodus effect exists can be shown by an independent measurement in a good vacuum chamber or by a test in space. That is how science works: an extraordinary claim calls for strong evidence, and that evidence is within reach. If the test turns out well, it would be a major discovery in physics.

Will Marty McFly's hoverboard then ever become real? Floating boards already exist, but so far only with a magnetic track or jet engines. A board that floats silently anywhere without fuel needs a force that nobody has yet demonstrated independently. If the Exodus effect exists, that is the first step, and the work begins of making the force tens of thousands of times stronger. If the test falls short, magnets and engines remain the best route for now. Either way, Marty's dream is still alive.

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