In Honor of Back to the Future Day, Hoverboards Are Now Legal in Austria

If you've been on the Internet today, you know that this marks the day Doc Brown and Marty McFly drove a DeLorean straight into the 21st century in Back to the Future Part II. The movie’s plot takes off when the two time-travelers joyride from 1985 into the not-so-distant "future”—Oct. 21, 2015. There, they find hoverboards, space-age clothing, and flying cars.

While prototypes have been made, hoverboards still don’t exist commercially. However, that pesky fact hasn’t kept Austria’s government from releasing a set of guidelines for their usage, Agence France-Presse reports.

Yesterday, the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology announced in a playful article that they would be providing “legal clarity” to the fictional invention. The agency defined hoverboards as a “small vehicle for use outside the road,” and warned that they should be ridden while wearing a helmet. They're welcome anywhere a skateboard is allowed, but a pilot’s certificate and flight authorization is required if you want to take a rocket-powered Pit Bull hoverboard for a spin.

“Well, we were just taking a look at the laws and thinking about how it would apply to hoverboards, so we wrote an article as a joke," Christoph Heshmatpour, from the Ministry of Transport in Vienna, told Mic. "We asked some of our legislation experts at the Ministry of Transport how Austrian laws would apply if the hover board existed...Then we put together some Frequently Asked Questions ('Where can I use the hover board?,' 'Do I need a driver's license?' etc.)." 

While we're in on the joke, we won't be needing these laws—or buying hoverboards—today. But to quote Marty McFly, our kids are probably gonna love them.

[h/t Agence France-Presse, Mic]