Go Off-Roading with New Vehicles for Cars Ride
By Disney Destinations March 8th, 2025
Life is an off-road rally race, and Lightning McQueen,
Mater, and the rest of the Cars from Pixar Animation Studios’ Cars are going to
ride it all night long.
First announced at last year’s D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan
Event, and brand-new Cars themed area is speeding in to Magic Kingdom at Walt
Disney World. Here, the Cars crew leaves Radiator Springs behind and heads off
into the frontier to put their wheels to the test.
Now at The Future of World-Building at Disney panel at SXSW,
Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Doctor, and Imagineer Michael Hundgen teased
that guests will need to strap in because they’re in the process of creating a
new type of ride vehicle for this experience.
“Our primary goal is creating an emotional experience for
our guests,” Hundgen told the crowd. “For this Cars attraction we need to
invent a new type of ride vehicle. No one builds these in a factory because it
has to do so much more than just carrying you from one place to another. We have
to create a car that conveys a feeling when you ride it.”
The team took a trip out to the Arizona desert to jump in a
real off-road vehicle to see what it felt like driving over the rocky terrain. These
are all things Lightning McQueen and Mater haven’t experienced before like
racing over rocky terrain, ascending to mountain peaks, and dodging around
geysers – how do you take these real-world elements and put a Cars spin on it?
From there, the Imagineers worked with a motocross company
to build a real dirt track to race around on and took that data back to begin
working on creating how the ride vehicles will eventually move and race.
“We’re using a customized production vehicle,” Hundgen
continued. “It has sensors all over it, and we’re taking it for test drives on
our dirt track to gather data on how the vehicle responds to different terrain.
This is where we turn that feeling we want into real-world engineering,” Michael
explained.
But all this talk about cars, what do they look like?
That’s where the Pixar team steps in. for some show and tell
to get the crowd revved up, Doctor shared some early concept sketches with the
audience, teasing that they’re creating “new race car personalities for this
attraction. Each vehicle in the ride will have its own name and number, just
like a real reace.”
