The Hovertrax is a battery powered transportation toy, a self-balancing scooter, designed by American-Asian designer Shane Chen. It is known primarily through cheaper imitations copied by and distributed globally from factories in China, that have been popularised as hoverboards.

Originally patented in the USA in 2011, Hovertrax was developed out of Chen’s interest in creating solo transportation solutions under his brand Inventist Inc. It grew out of a previous invention, the Solowheel, a singular motorised wheel which riders balance either side of and can travel at 10mph. Solowheel was foremost designed as a form of transportation but didn’t have a major impact in the same way as “hoverboards” due to consumers’ inability to perceive how to ride it easily – its unicycle appearance makes it look like it would take much practice to master.

While pitching the Solowheel to retailers at a trade fair, Chen’s daughter was stunt riding a Solowheel on each foot which inspired Chen to think about a double-wheeled vehicle. He developed the Hovertrax from this idea, but it’s smaller wheels and tyres meant it could only travel half the speed and essentially making it a toy that moved at little more than walking pace.

Chen produced a few thousand of these products but manufactured to high standards using high quality motors and batteries. As such, their retail price, around $1000, limited their reach. Instead factories in China started making copies with lower quality materials that meant they could sell at around a quarter of that price. More than a million copies were made and sold by 2015, but with weaker motors and batteries that are more likely to catch fire. Consumers wanted the product but only at a cheap price, and the retailers such as supermarkets sold the cheaper brands, never mind that copyright and design rights laws and patents had been infringed.

The product became popularly known as a hoverboard, a reference to a science-fiction concept from Robert Zemeckis’ 1989 film Back to the Future II. The main character, Marty McFly, who is an experienced skateboarder, travels to 2015, where he discovers the hoverboard, which is a skateboard that hovers above the ground without wheels. This product’s infiltration into popular culture has long occasioned a desire for this concept to come true, and users of the Hovertrax and it’s copies quickly aligned the products movement with the concept, despite it running on wheels. This heightened consumers’ desire for the product and increased sales of copies around the world.