Hot Wheels Cars by Mattel have been making a sensation in the die-cast industry over the last few years to offer enhanced customer experience for those who want to know more about car’s speed and race tracks. Mattel has already designed augmented reality cars and remote controlling vehicles, and now, this die-cast brand has created a digital twist in Hot Wheels Cars by enabling NFC technology.
Although Mattel’s Hot Wheels ID vehicle seems like another simple toy car, yet all of them contain a small NFC chip located at the bottom of the car to determine its race time and speed. Therefore, kids who claim that their cars run faster will now have data to support the race’s speed.
Working of Hot Wheels ID Car
The working of the Hot Wheels ID vehicle is also similar to an average toy car. Put the car inside the pump launcher, which is attached to a track. Now slightly push the large round button through your palm to drive the car. In this release, Mattel has embedded an NFC reader with the track that counts the total number of rounds completed by the car. This data is then transmitted to a new ID app compatible with both iOS and Android through BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy).
This working of NFC-enabled Hot Wheels ID makes the toy car perfect for children and car fans who are obsessed with stats as it helps them to check whose car won the race. These stats include total distance traveled, speed limit, and a measure of laps taken.
Smart Track & Race Portal
To know the stats of the car, first, you need to register your vehicle on your device by tapping its NFC chip. In case if your device doesn’t contain any NFC reader, you can also use the race portal, which is not only the piece of track but a smart tracing component as well. The broad stocky parts of the track are connected by USB to transmit data back to the app, such as which pieces are present and how the track looks like, along with guiding the car’s fans to build the track step by step.
Nevertheless, race portal application is more than this: it keeps kids engaging by issuing race challenges, for example, achieving X number of laps, traveling X amount of distance, or running with X number of speeds. After completing the challenge, the app rewards the kid and issues a new challenge. The rewards help the kids to unlock new features of cars and enjoy premium gaming content.
Another fantastic feature of the app is it lets you enter in the virtual racing world where you can do the racing of virtual copies of your vehicle collection. Everything is virtual, though, kids feel like racing of cars in the real-world.
But since everything comes with a price: the cost of a race portal is $40, whereas the price of broad stocky pieces connected by USB will charge you $180 along with two exclusive vehicles. The price of each NFC-enabled Hot Wheels car is $7. Mattel has launched 51 different models of cars with NFC chip. Among them, they’ve also included real-world models of Dodge SRT Viper and Lamborghini Miura and some fantasy designs of Motosaurus and Batmobile.
