If you have a child in your house under 15, then you’re probably intimately familiar with Lightning Mcqueen and the Pixar movie franchise Cars. The Cars crew is heading back to the big screen next month with the launch of Cars 3 on June 22nd, and Sphero, makers of some of the coolest mobile app controlled robots on the market, including our favourite little droid: BB8, are releasing the best movie tie-in toy ever with Ultimate Lightning McQueen.
The Sphero Ultimate Lightning McQueen car offers all the fun of a remote controlled car top-end racing machine, complete with all the bells and whistles including specially recorded new phrases from Lightning Mcqueen himself, Owen Wilson.
As a Sphero product though, this is no ordinary remote controlled car. It’s got so much hardware and smarts built-in it’s almost ready to take to the road by itself. Under the hood you’ll find:
– 6 Motors
– 5 Capacitive Touch Panels
– 3 Processors
– Custom-Built Trapezoidal Screen
– Automatic Head and Tail Lights
– Custom-Built Animations
– Custom Speaker and Speaker Box Design
– Versatile Tires
That’s a lot of hardware , but what does all this do? Sphero’s Ultimate Lightning McQueen is as close to the ‘real’ Lightning McQueen as possible with animated eyes, an animatronic mouth, and emotive suspension which all make for a car that feels like it’s alive. Those 6 motors underneath make for a fun experience letting Lightning lift himself up, lean and basically move just like he does in the movies.
The capacitive touch panels allow Lightning to react when you simply touch him on either the roof, bonnet, doors or the rear window to wake him up or perform other actions.
The versatile tyres allow Lightning to race, drift or slide on carpet or smooth tiles at either fast or low speeds for some really cool looking effects.
As with all the Sphero bots the device is cool, but it gets really fun when you connect your Android or iOS device. Once you’re connected to the app, you can simply drag your finger around on the driving pad to direct lightning – just push the joystick to get him to drive, drift, do a donut or just drop into the cool leans he does when racing in the movies. You can also train hard with lightning as he coaches you to ‘race the clock changing tires, fueling up, and getting racers back on the track’.
There’s two really awesome features built-in including the ‘Acting Studio’ which lets you direct lightning, creating scripts which include your favourite phrases and programming in actions for him to perform. You can also simply watch Cars with Lightning beside you, and he’ll react to the movie with cool phrases – a handy feature to use while he’s charging.
The app is of course free on Google Play – and the iOS app store.
So, now you’re salivating and rightly so because this is cool – but it’s a bit pricey with the Sphero Lightning McQueen heading to EB Games & Zing where it’s available to pre-order from today for $499.
