KIDSCAR: RELAX, DAD . . . LET’S SEE WHAT THIS BABY CAN DO
As youngsters fall out of love with cars, Toyota is fighting back with a vehicle for children. Harry Wallop lets his son take the wheel
O NLY a few years ago environmentalists were worrying about how our addiction to the car was going to destroy the planet. Scroll forward a few years and car companies are wringing their hands at how an entire generation has fallen out of love with the motor vehicle.
This explains why I was the first person in the UK to test a concept car built by Toyota called the CamAtte, which translates as “Play with me”. Or rather, my son, Alexander, aged 10, was the first to drive it. I was in the back seat, my hand nervously hovering over an emergency parental handbrake.
The car, which looks as solid as a Playmobil safari Jeep, is designed for a child to drive. It has just one proper seat and a mere handful of controls: an on/off button, a knob that puts the vehicle into reverse or drive, a steering wheel, an accelerator pedal and a brake pedal. All are controlled by the child.
But there is also a very tiny back seat, into which the parent can squash. And it is here that you can find the emergency handbrake and — if things are looking as if your offspring is about to cause a pile-up — a circuit breaker that will shut down the entire vehicle, which is run on rechargeable lead acid batteries.
“The whole idea,” says Nik Pearson at Toyota, “is about increasing interest not just in cars, but also in engineering. We want this to be an inspiration for young people not just to get into driving, but also to encourage a future generation of engineers.”
Though it may seem a slightly loopy idea to push more pre-teens on to our roads — the CamAtte is designed for those aged nine and upwards — Toyota stresses that this vehicle will never be seen outside a test track.
The Japanese manufacturer, along with other car firms, has good reason to be worried.
The rising cost of learning to drive and running a car has resulted in a decrease in learner drivers. Not only has the price of petrol more or less doubled in the past decade, but car insurance for young people has shot up.
In Japan, the trend is even more pronounced. It is not just high costs putting off young drivers, but also increasing urbanisation, which has meant that late teens don’t need their own set of wheels. Driving a car simply isn’t as essential as it once was — and even those who have passed their test are driving less.
All of these factors have combined to diminish the cachet that youngsters once attached to owning their own car. Young people prize “access over ownership”, says Sheryl Connelly, head of global consumer trends at Ford. “I don’t think car-buying for Millennials will ever be what it was for Boomers.” This explains the increasing popularity of carshare clubs among young people.
Prior to his spin, the only time Alexander had spent behind a wheel was on a day of go-karting, though like a surprising number of prepubescent boys he worships Top Gear. “What happens if I crash it?” he asks Pearson rather gleefully. “Please don’t,” the man from Toyota says. “It’s the only one in the world and it’s worth about £500 000.”
At this point my son quietly gulps. He needn’t, because helping him in his quest to keep the car in pristine condition is a little panel hidden behind the parental handbrake that contains the driving speed dial. This limits the car to a speed of the parent’s choosing. The highest possible speed of the car is 60km/h. We choose 40km/h.
The car couldn’t have been easier to drive, according to Alexander, though it struggled to get started every time he turned the engine on, with the vehicle spluttering and bunny hopping for a few seconds. But within a few minutes, he is merrily putting his foot down hard and trying to hit the top speed of 40km/h, which it reaches pretty swiftly.
The highlight for him is driving fast along the straight, empty road and rapidly spinning the screeching car 180 degrees — it has a turning circle of just 5.4m. This alarms me the first time he does it as I convince myself we are going to flip over. I can only think of the ignominy of being crushed to death by an ugly Japanese concept car on a test track in Surrey, while Alexander thinks he is James Bond, or worse — some manqué Jeremy Clarkson.
I am assured by the Toyota engineer that, at 580kg, the car is far too heavy and stable (however flimsy it might look) to come a cropper. And though I feel like a lone chickpea being spun around an empty tin can, I never feel insecure as my squashed rear seat allows me to be a genuine back-seat driver and grab the steering wheel in a real emergency. Which I do on one occasion when Alexander’s “parking” threatens to put a serious dent in the side of the Toyota engineer’s own car, resting at the side of the track.
Alexander was impressed. “I really enjoyed spinning the car around. And I liked the freedom of being in control of your own vehicle,” he says, adding that for long stretches he was able to forget my hovering presence in the back. Has it lit a burning desire to become a car owner? “Um, not really.”
It was a fun day, for although the concept of cars driven by children realistically has no future, the CamAtte is still an intriguing idea. I must confess, however, that as a man who has never loved cars (and who took five attempts to pass his driving test), it would not bother me if my children never embraced their inner Richard Hammond.