James Spence

Fast Wheels is a way of converting standard 1/64th scale cars (ie Hot Wheels or Matchbox sized cars) into remote controlled racers.  The toy comes in three parts: controller, the back wheels/engine and a demo car.

It really sparked my imagination…

The demo car is not great but let’s not dwell on this.  To focus on the demo car would be to miss the point of the toy:  it’s all about transforming your Hot Wheels (etc) into remote controlled vehicles.  In fact, the demo car is so inconsequential, you can run the back wheels without any car attached.

The wheels have a small set of stabilisers at the rear.  This can be set to two different positions.  One for running the car on carpets and one for running on flat surfaces.

Charging the car takes around ten minutes and grants you two minutes of play, which is actually not too bad as these things go.

Although not perfect, I wouldn’t want to write off this toy.  I really love the concept of turning small cars into RCs.  I’d love to see this concept better realised, perhaps if Fast Wheels were to go back to the drawing board and fix the navigation, improve the demo car and make it feel more substantial they could have a real must-have toy on their hands.

Fast Wheels is available from Toys R Us