Kids aren’t into cars, you say? Look at the sales of the latest Gran Turismo or Forza video games, or the number of hits on any Ken Block gymkhana video. They’re into cars, all right; they’re just getting their kicks from the couch. But how to instill an appreciation for the visceral world over the virtual one?
Maybe by teaching them to orbit the couch in a drift that would make Block puke. The $400 Razor Crazy Cart looks like a cafeteria tray with a steering wheel, and is to the Power Wheels Disney Princess Tot Rod what the SRT Viper is to a golf cart. The Crazy Cart has a sturdy steel chassis and an oddball drive arrangement that gives it unsurpassed spinning and sliding capabilities. Its electrically driven pneumatic front tire steers 180 degrees left or right. Two freely rotating casters support the tail, and another pair up front prevents tip-overs. Controls are limited to the steering wheel, an accelerator pedal, and a “drift bar” that effectively erases all rear grip and allows you to spin in place, pull off sweeping drifts, and drive backward. Yanking the drift bar shifts the rear casters’ swivel angle from tilted to vertical, ceding all directional control to the drive wheel. There is no brake.
Smoothly executing tricks takes practice. After grazing our cubical walls for several laps, we learned to plan stops minutes in advance and use a simple lift-throttle oversteer technique, leaving the drift bar for stomach-churning, 360-degree twirls. Once you get the process down, it’s a blast. It’s perfect for kids and other dizziness fetishists who weigh less than (or, as in our case, slightly more than) the 140-pound limit. It might even make Ken Block go on a crash diet.
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Crazy Commuting 101
Upon familiarizing ourselves with the Crazy Cart’s lack of brakes and loose directional control, and its unsuitability for riders larger than 10-year-olds, we decided the little EV would make a stellar commuting alternative to the hot metal we typically take home. To test whether the Razor could even make the proposed 3.2-mile journey from one side of Ann Arbor to the C/D offices on the other side, we lapped our indoor cubical farm for more than an hour—Razor promises a 40-minute run time—and determined the Cart’s ultimate range to be 3.5 miles. Plan (sort of) codified and battery topped off, we took the Razor out into the real world. Watch how it turned out:
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