Ride-hailing service Lyft is offering free DeLorean rides Wednesday, October 21st in New York City to celebrate Back to the Future Day, when Marty McFly and Doc Brown traveled to the future in the (let's face it) middling sequel to the 1985 original blockbuster. The company is partnering with Universal and Verizon for the promotion, which will be offered to users from 11AM to 5PM via a "McFly Mode" toggle on the app. Rides will be free, but the ability to travel either forward or back through the timestream is dependent on reaching 88 mph, and the speed limit in the Big Apple was just lowered to 25 mph, so don't get your hopes up.

The promotion is in conjunction with Verizon's #WhyNotWednesday campaign, which appears to be the telecom's attempt to create their own branded #ThrowbackThursday hashtag.

But can Lyft meet the demand of all those Nike Air Mag-sporting, Hoverboard-coveting, Hill Valleyites that will no doubt be furiously tapping their smartphones in the hopes of hailing a majestic, gull-winged DeLorean? A company spokeswoman tells The Verge that Lyft is shipping DMC-12s from "all over the country" to meet the expected demand. How many vehicles exactly is not a number she was willing to share, unfortunately, so we have no way of knowing how many time machines will be clogging the streets of New York City on Wednesday. Let's say less than 6,500, given that it's the number of original DMC-12s estimated to be in existence.

As with all things Lyft, the company is basically following in the footsteps of its main rival Uber, which offered DeLorean rides in San Francisco back in September 2013 in partnership with General Electric. Maybe Lyft's CEO Logan Green can use one of the DeLoreans to go back in time and prevent the Uber promotion from ever happening. Or prevent Travis Kalanick from being born. Or travel to the future and bring back some advanced autonomous driving technology that makes all this brand nonsense completely irrelevant.