During today’s “The Future of World-Building at Disney” session at SXSW 2025, a first look at the ride vehicle concept was revealed for the off-road “Cars” attraction coming to Magic Kingdom, as well as early sketches for the cars themselves.
First Look at “Cars” Personalities and Ride Vehicle Concept for Magic Kingdom Expansion
First announced at last year’s D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event, a brand-new Cars-themed area is speeding into Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, with two new attractions. There, the “Cars” crew leaves Radiator Springs behind and heads off into the frontier formerly occupied by the Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer Island.
Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter and Imagineer Michael Hundgen made an appearance during the session, revealing that Walt Disney Imagineering is creating a new type of ride vehicle for the off-road experience.
Our primary goal is creating an emotional experience for our guests. 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 in it.
Walt Disney Imagineer Michael Hundgen
They shared that the project team took a trip out to the Arizona desert for research, utilizing real off-road vehicles to experience what it could feel like for guests when riding over the terrain proposed for the attraction.
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 work on creating how the ride vehicles would eventually move and race.
While the track shown above is not the exact attraction layout, Imagineers wanted to craft terrain that Lightning McQueen and Mater hadn’t experienced before, like “racing over rocky terrain, ascending to mountain peaks, and dodging around geysers.”
See the off-road track in the video below:
We’re using a customized production vehicle. 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.
Walt Disney Imagineer Michael Hundgen
Above is a maquette version of a very basic ride vehicle concept. In the video shown during the session, the vehicle moved along a single-rail model track, rolling over raised obstacles with a range of motion similar to the vehicles on DINOSAUR or Indiana Jones Adventure.
As for the cars that guests might encounter or ride in, Pixar and Imagineering are already at work creating these new characters. Above are early sketches released during the session of three of those cars.
Docter teased 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 race.”
The upcoming “Cars” expansion will take over the footprint of Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer Island, as part of a 14-acre expansion of Magic Kingdom that also includes an area behind Big Thunder Mountain Railroad themed to Disney Villains. In February 2025, the demolition permit for the project was approved by the South Florida Water Management District, officially giving the green light for work to commence.
The announcement was made during a Live-Stream SXSW Session hosted by Disney Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro and Co-Chairman Alan Bergman.
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