Cars is coming to Frontierland, and the new themed area will be replacing the Rivers of America. The signature attraction of this new area will be an “off-roading” attraction.
At The Future of World-Building at Disney panel at SXSW, Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter and Imagineer Michael Hundgen revealed new details about this Cars attraction and the overall creative process.
“Our primary goal is creating an emotional experience for our guests,” Hundgen told the SXSW crowd. “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.”
Imagineers took a trip out to the Arizona desert to jump in a real off-road vehicle to see what it felt like driving over the rocky terrain. This is a new road traveled for the Cars franchise. Remember, this story will see Lightning McQueen, Mater, and the gang outside of Radiator Springs. This new area and attraction will have a rocky terrain, mountain peaks, and geysers.
Walt Disney Imagineering doing research for the upcoming CARS attraction in Frontierland. pic.twitter.com/jfDlTF2yYu
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After the research trip in Arizona, 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 will eventually move.
“The workload on our ride vehicles far exceeds a normal car,” Hundgen told the SXSW crowd. “They run 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for decades. If your car does 13,000 miles a year, our go up to 65,000 miles every year, depending on the attraction. And on top of that, we’re running it on this really tough terrain.”
“We’re using a customized production vehicle,” Hundgen told the SXSW crowd. “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.”
Docter then shared some early concept sketches for the attraction’s new characters. Pixar is collaborating with Walt Disney Imagineering to make “new race car personalities for this attraction. Each vehicle in the ride will have its own name and number, just like a real race.”
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Zach Perilstein is the Editor-in-Chief of the Boardwalk Times
