How accurate were Back to the Future II’s predictions about October 21, 2015?

Unlike its predecessor, Back to the Future Part II actually lives up to its name. In the wildly successful, franchise-spawning first film from 1985, teenager Marty McFly (Michael  J. Fox) and friend Emmett “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd) go back in time to 1955, but in the 1989 sequel they go forward, and then back, as they attempt to repair problems they caused by their time travel in the previous film, but actually end up creating as many issues as they solve.

And what unimaginably futuristic era do they leap forward to? Why, the hoverboard-hopping, driverless car-riding, techno-utopian dot on the space-time horizon that is 2015 – specifically, October 21, 2015, ie this Wednesday. So, with us all having lived through 2015 so far and witnessed all the wonderful technological advances of the era, we are in a position to judge how accurate the film’s predictions of the future were.

Back to the Future Part II visual effects art director John Bell has said that he only knew that the film would be set 30 years in the future and feature “something called hoverboards”, and the film’s vision of that future is a fairly gleaming, optimistic one, a 1950s Jetsons view rather than the bleak, Blade Runner-like dystopian gloom and grime that tended to dominate 1980s science fiction. But despite the fact that the film aims mainly for humour rather than accuracy in its predictions, it’s often surprisingly prescient – more so than most films that take the business of forecasting the future far more seriously.

So what did the filmmakers get right about Marty and Doc’s exotic world of the distant future, and what did they get wrong?

Hoverboards

Hoverboards are perhaps the film’s defining futuristic technology and one that everyone has always wanted to come true (director Robert Zemeckis claimed at the time that the hoverboards were real and were only kept out of the public domain for safety reasons; as a result people have been asking him since where they can get one). We have self-balancing scooters, a kind of skateboard-meets-Segway, but nothing that actually floats in mid-air. There are a couple of maglev-based boards in development, however: one from Japanese carmaker Lexus, and the Hendo hoverboard from US company Arx Pax.