At this year’s SXSW, Walt Disney Imagineering has shown off the vehicles and planned experience for the new Cars ride at Magic Kingdom.
First revealed at last year’s D23 fan event, Magic Kingdom is getting two Cars attractions in a reimagined area of Frontierland.
At the 2025 South by Southwest event, Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter and Imagineer Michael Hundgen spoke about one of these new rides, via a Disney blog post.
“When we’re designing our attractions, our primary goal is to create an emotional experience for our guests, just like the filmmakers do on the screen,” Hundgen said.
“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.”
The Imagineering team even took a trip to the Arizona desert to drive real off-road vehicles and experience what it’s like to drive over rocky terrain.
New type of ride vehicle for Cars attraction
From there, Disney‘s Imagineers worked with a motocross company to construct a real dirt track to race around on, then started working on how the new ride vehicles will move and race.
“We’re using a customized production vehicle,” Hundgen said.
“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.”
The Pixar team, meanwhile, is creating “new race car personalities for this attraction”, said Docter.
“Each vehicle in the ride will have its own name and number, just like a real race.”
At SXSW, Disney also teased the new Monsters, Inc. coaster coming to Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Images courtesy of Disney
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