Why it matters to you
Even if you’d rather just watch, this German electric skateboard company has come up with a way to make a scintillating transport method even better.
We’ve all been there. You’re running late for work, your office is the other side of a giant frozen lake, and all you’ve got to get there is a regular skateboard, a battery pack, a few dozen carbide metal studs, and a handy engineering degree.
What do you do? Well, the obvious answer would be to hammer together something like the amazing electric Mellow e-Iceboard, built by a team of engineers in Germany. Capable of speeding across frozen vistas at up to 40 kilometers per hour, it’s the only way to travel over ice in style.
More: Motorize your favorite scuffed-up skateboard with Mellow
“Ice skating was originally used as easy transportation way back when, in Spreewald, East Germany, [which is sometimes] known as ‘Little Venice.’” Mellow Boards team member Steven Uy told Digital Trends.
Mellow Boards first burst onto the scene in 2015 as a firm that created a successful Kickstarter campaign to manufacture snap-on battery packs for skateboards. Earlier this year, a backer of the original Kickstarter campaign came up with an idea to make a cool concept even cooler by adding extra grip to the skateboard to let it travel on ice.
Jump forward a short time, and the Mellow Boards team had hacked together the world’s first electric-powered spikewheel iceboard racer.
But surely there’s no way to make the idea even better? Think again — because the team next hopes to turn it into a competitive sport.
“E-skate ice racing is like a street race, with the added complexity of the ice making a damn fine line between a drift and a hurtling crash,” Uy said. “Forty kilometers an hour seems slow in a car, but it’s nerve-racking when standing on a thin board without bindings on the ice.
As seen in Red Bull’s Crashed Ice competitions, what makes ice dangerous also makes it — mostly — safe. A board like the Mellow has enough torque, even at high speeds, to shred ice easily, making racing and maneuvering a matter of finesse, not brute motor force.
Whether we’re all glued to TVs showing ice skateboarding competitions a few years from now remains to be seen, but this is definitely one of the greatest (and most heart-pumping) new concepts we’ve seen in a while. Although we’d rather let you try it out before we have a go!