Jack of Harts

I went vulture diving this weekend. I went to Toys R Us. It felt like I was walking into a grave. But in many ways it was a grave of their own making. And Hot Wheels AI is one of the examples.

What is Hot Wheels AI? It was an interesting gimmick that failed. But that failure makes it no less interesting or even revolutionary. It was marketed as an intelligent racing system, and sported small RC cars with replaceable smart bodies and optical sensors that allowed them to race on specially designed smart tracks. They could even race around the tracks in autonomous mode without any input from the players.

It’s a very cool and interesting system, and the RC cars are actually very good. They have what many of us used to call analog-style controls where the steering and speed gradually expanded as you pulled the controls further. Rather than the single turn or single speed that most cheap remote controlled cars have. And their top speed is actually fairly impressive. But they are designed for indoor use only. Very low clearance that works great on hard woods or tile, and even some very short carpets. But do not take them outside. They’ll get stuck between the sidewalk cracks.

And that, in the end, is the problem with them. One of the problems. They are SMALL RC cars with small tires and very low clearance. They’re maybe six or eight inches long, which is very small for an RC car. The kicker is that each car is forty bucks, and most smart body kits are twenty bucks if you want to try new looks. You can get a much more capable outdoor RC car for that price. But the standard RC car won’t have the optical sensors, autodrive feature for smart tracks, or the other fun little gimmicks. Do you want to drive around with Mario Karts on special Mario themed tracks? Or do you want to drive the Batmobile around? You can do it through the magic of replaceable smart bodies.

But…forty dollars is simply too expensive. It was a cool idea, a revolutionary idea in many ways, but the price point put it out of the market of what most people were willing to spend. So the line died out. I only ever saw it at Toys R Us. But even there, people were not willing to pay forty dollars for a small RC car, no matter how cool it was. So it languished on the shelves for months and longer. Like many of the special exclusive toys that Toys R Us got and marketed to us, hoping we would pay more for the cool.

It didn’t work, and now Toys R Us is going out of business. And now you can find Hot Wheels AI cars at the steadily closing stores for more like twenty dollars a piece, and the smart bodies are more like ten bucks. Now that’s worth it. I bought a couple, along with some track, and I tested them out. They were fun. They were very fun. They were a blast. And at twenty bucks a piece, I will get some more before Toys R Us closes.

And I’m going to suggest, that if you have kids or kids at heart who want to have a cool little RC car to play around with indoors, that you take a look at the Hot Wheels AI cars. Maybe even the track if you have room to put it down. But even without the track, they are fun little cars to play with.

And you’re simply not going to find a better RC car for the price of admission.