Though this news will surely hit the overwhelming number of active hoverboard enthusiasts pretty hard, perhaps its ramifications will bring about easily attainable alternatives that actually hover. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has confirmed to Mashable that "no hoverboard currently on the market" can be accurately described as safe, a decision reached after months of investigating the highly publicized risks of danger associated with hoveringnot hovering.
The CPSC, armed with a quick GIF, even directly called out the manufacturers of these deceptively non-hovering devices on Twitter:
"This is us drawing a line in the sand and a notice for the entire hoverboard community," CPSC chairman Elliot F. Kaye tells Mashable. "From our perspective, a smart retailer will put in place a stop sale to find out if their inventory complies with the UL standard." This "UL standard," of course, is in reference to the independent certification testing firm responsible for the bulk of similar safety designations for a wide variety of major American companies.
Though none of the CPSC's actions include a mandatory recall, officials are asking that both manufacturers and resellers "voluntarily take hoverboards off the market" until they can achieve that UL certification. Researchers at the CPSC were not able to successfully instigate a flame during their own safety tests, a common problem for these pesky non-hovering hoverboards, but were successful in getting the device's temperature "hot enough that there was significant melting."
Adding that "all options are on the table," including options of the legal persuasion, Kaye is confident that all impacted businesses will quickly start to ready their respective stock to ease the obvious headache of a potential recall. Though not directly mentioned by Kaye or the CPSC's statement to Mashable, this will likely bring a swift end to society's seemingly endless supply of insufferable hoverboard fail video compilations.
