Turn Pavement Into Powder, The Worlds Worst Faceshot

With snowboarding being seasonal there always seems to be someone out to invent some new form of off season activity to satiate the thirst for sliding sideways on snow. While most are content to ride a skateboard or cruise around on a longboard, that just doesn’t always work for the non mechanically inclined. Which is why there’s always someone, somewhere that feels they can create the next recreational fad.

Enter the LEIF a motorized Freebord. Not familiar with a Freebord? Well think of it as a longboard with a caster wheel in the middle of the truck so you can skid turns and not have to commit to a carve or speed. Then add to it these weird hooks you wedge your foot into so you’re locked in.

As per usual this new invention hasn’t fully come into existence, but with your help via the glorious self funding website Kickstarter it can. After all it helped one young man fund his goal of Potato Salad.

Now marketing a product is key and these guys want the snowboard market, not the cross country skateboard market that would more aptly fit into their product. With all marketing there has to be claims of improvement and greatness.

Turn your neighborhood’s pavement into powder!

Because we all want a hot and gritty face shot that leaves us looking like this.

Snowboard Everywhere.

Oh wait there was some fine print “Snowboard anywhere the concrete leads you – across flat ground or even uphill.”

Oh dang you can snowboard on concrete? Wait isn’t that what urban riders do when jibbing? But the flat ground and up hill aspects are more intriguing, have they reinvented cross country snowboarding?

Now, you can snowboard all summer long for less than the cost of just one snowboard trip!

Oh silly marketing people, how is it snowboarding when you don’t even ride a snowboard? Or you’re not on snow or some form of artificial snow? This is motorized Freebording. They forgot to mention the current price of $1299 too.

Riding the LEIF captures the exhilaration, mechanics and feel of snowboarding. The same snowboarding body movements produce the same result and ride on pavement.

Except for that whole setting in and locking when on edge. Skidded turns will only get you so far.

The board is cutting through the pavement like a freshly-groomed mountain slope.

If the board is cutting through the pavement there might be bigger things to worry about.

Snowboard uphill for the first time ever.

Someone doesn’t understand how momentum works when riding down a rolling trail. We’ve all gone uphill on a snowboard at one point or another even if the incline was minimal.

Now not to discourage these guys, but marketing to the snowboard crowd seems to be a miss. This should more or less have gone up against the crowd of four wheeled enthusiasts that use this as a way of traveling around the urban landscape. There’s too many generic claims that won’t live up to the dynamics of snowboarding. With 21 days left to go they’re still a ways off from their goal of $90,000. The better option for a board that could go anywhere is this.