HudsonMOD features Neoteric HoverGolf™ Cart

The tsunami of publicity about Bubba’s Hover rushes on. The Neoteric HoverGolf™ Cart is featured this month in HudsonMOD, a luxury lifestyle magazine that prides itself on treating its New York City readers to “the best the world has to offer” …

HudsonMOD

September 2013

THE WOW – You know you want it

Neoteric HoverGolf™ Cart

A video that could have been taken on any golf course shows your run-of-the-mill golf cart winding down a paved pathway. But suddenly, a larger cart flashes across the screen. Never mind that the driver of this floating golf cart is none other than 2012 Masters champion Bubba Watson, who deadpans with a nonchalant stare back at a gawking golfer. The golfer looks like he’s seen something he can’t very well explain. Yes, that’s a hovercraft on the links. Welcome to the future.

What started as a clever marketing stunt earlier this year by Thinkmodo to drive interest to Bubba Watson’s promotional deal with Oakley has had another, truly astonishing, effect. Since being uploaded to YouTube, the video “Bubba’s Hover” has gone viral, receiving more than eight million views thus far and garnering worldwide media attention for Neoteric, the manufacturers of rescue, military and commercial hovercrafts - and now the first hovercraft golf cart on the planet, the BW1. 

“Since the viral video hit YouTube, we’ve been deluged with inquiries from all over the world,” says Filip Przybysz, an executive at Neoteric. The prototype bearing Watson’s initials has given rise to 100 limited-edition HoverGolf carts that are custom manufactured at the close of each sale. “At this point, we have shipped the first order and are in the process of shipping the second to customers in the US,” he says.

One of the recipients of the accommodating four-passenger, two-golf-bag, 65-horsepower vehicle is the Windy Knoll Golf Club, in Springfield, OH, which recently became the first golf course in the US to purchase two $58,000 hovercrafts with lift-up roofs and the latest noise-reducing fan technology. But why wait for your local golf course to follow suit with futuristic rides? You could be piloting a cushion of air across water hazards in no time with your very own personal hovercraft.

Finally, a reason to smile about spraying a shot: You get to drive in a BW1 to find the ball. The future has arrived. Score!

Learn more at hovercrafttraining.com and facebook.com/HovercraftTraining

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As the article says, “Why wait for your local golf course to offer futuristic rides?”  Sign up right now for a Hovercraft Test Flight or Training Course in a Neoteric Hovercraft at Hovercraft Training Centers!

Enjoy a few photos of the Neoteric HoverGolf™ Cart in action ... 

Bubba Watson flies the BW1 during the filming of Bubba's Hover at the Raven Golf Club in Phoenix, Arizona.

The BW1 flies over sandtraps at an Oakley charity event held at the Heritage Club in Mason, Ohio.

At another Oakley charity event, the BW1 captures attention at the Four Bridges Country Club in Liberty Township, Ohio.

At the Four Bridges Country Club - or at any golf course - water hazards are no obstacle for the Neoteric Hovercraft Golf Cart.

The BW1 was filmed at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ, with NBC's Matt Lauer and Al Roker at the controls.

Hovering over a Terre Haute success

The Terre Haute Tribune-Star gives kudos to Neoteric Hovercraft, recognizing the positive impact Neoteric is having on our city and state ...

Tribune-Star Editorial

Aug. 1, 2013

Hovering over a Terre Haute success

Finally, the world knows about Neoteric

Chris Fitzgerald’s Neoteric Hovercraft company of Terre Haute has become an overnight international success and a viral novelty in cyberspace.

Overnight, though, only if you translate that as meaning decades of envisioning, designing and building hovercraft in relative obscurity. Overnight in the same sense as an actor who becomes a Broadway star after decades of toiling in summer stock.

To most of the world, the successes of Fitzgerald and his crew on Tippecanoe Street are breaking news – all owing to the game of golf.

It was April when a Floridian named Bubba flew one of Neoteric’s customized craft over a golf course. Other players in their wheeled golf carts watched in amazement as 2012 Masters winner Bubba Watson floated on a bubble of air from shot to shot, nine inches off the ground, in a HoverGolf Cart, a craft whose footprint pressure is 33 times lighter than the human foot. And the craft leaves no spike marks, divots or golf cart tracks.

Fitzgerald was front and center in the video of Bubba’s hovercraft outing, narrating much of it and appearing in its opening section.

A few days later, NBC “Today” show co-hosts Matt Lauer and Al Roker showed a national morning TV audience how the hovering golf cart worked.

Last Friday, Indiana Rep. Larry Bucshon, R-8^th, visited Neoteric’s plant to consider working to make Neoteric in Terre Haute a training center for the U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

The next day, on a Saturday made for golf, Windy Knoll Golf Club in Springfield, Ohio, became the first of the world’s 35,000 golf courses to offer the Neoteric model, [the official replica of Bubba Watson’s BW1] to its players at what it termed the “Hover Bash.”

You’ll forgive Fitzgerald if he’s scratching his head and wondering what took so long. He said as much in an interview with Yahoo! News in April: “I’ve been in this business for 50 years. You can pull your hair out trying to figure out how to get this information out that this [hovercraft] technology exists. In one fell swoop, [Bubba’s Hover has] gotten across all these hovercraft concepts to people.”

Fitzgerald, a native of Melbourne, Australia, who says his first experience with hovercraft came in 1959, is “kind of a celebrity now,” Thinkmodo marketing company’s Michael Krivicka told Yahoo! News. “Millionaires from Russia are calling him, placing orders.”

Much less known than the golf outings is that two of Neoteric’s craft were used in May to help divers out of the water after the collapse of an Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington state.

And perhaps forgotten is that Fitzgerald’s craft have been used several times to rescue local residents who were threatened by flood waters, as in that terrible day in June 2008 when heavy rains fell and deep water rose, especially in southern Vigo County.

With Neoteric’s newfound international notoriety comes a definite benefit for Terre Haute. As Neoteric’s Filip Przbysz told our Arthur Foulkes in a story a few days ago: “This could put Terre Haute on the world map.”

And it already has, and deserves the community’s congratulations.

It joins DADC, Bemis, the old Columbia Records, Larry Bird, Indiana State University, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Saint Mother Theodore Guerin and others in bringing worldwide distinction to Terre Haute and Vigo County.

But the difference with Neoteric is that it truly is riding on air.