New Concept Art & Ride Vehicle Details for Off-Road ‘Cars’ Ride in Magic Kingdom

Walt Disney World has shared new concept art and ride vehicle details for the Cars E-Ticket attraction coming to Magic Kingdom that further fuels rumors about the ride system it’ll likely use. This shares the latest updates along with testing videos, and offers speculation about the headliner attraction racing into Frontierland.

Before we dig into what’s new, let’s quickly bring you up to speed. During last year’s D23 Expo, Walt Disney World announced two all-new Cars attractions in a reimagined area of Frontierland at Magic Kingdom. Disney indicated that this would be an original concept–not a clone of Cars Land from Disney California Adventure.

Walt Disney World subsequently revealed that the Cars area will actually replace the Rivers of America, meaning that Tom Sawyer Island and the Liberty Square Riverboat will permanently close. This is not really germane to the topic at hand, but is relevant background because there’s a lot of understandable frustration about this, along with wishful thinking that the project will stall as a result of fan feedback and complaints.

We are among those who believe it’s a shortsighted mistake to replace the Rivers of America–even if it is underutilized capacity–with Cars Land. We likened Disney’s decision to paving paradise and putting up a parking lot–that’s how we feel about it in a nutshell. If you’d like more than the nutshell version, read this. I’m not rehashing it all here.

The major permit that was a roadblock for this project beginning was recently approved, and construction bidding materials suggest that work will begin–likely backstage first–sometime this month. By all accounts, Disney is ready to put the pedal to the metal on demolition and construction for Cars Land, which is another reason why we’re not relitigating the merits of retaining the Rivers of America.

Shifting gears to today’s news from Disney’s feature presentation, “The Future of World-Building at Disney,” during South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas on March 8, 2025. Disney Experiences Chairman Josh D’Amaro and Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman Alan Bergman took the stage, along with some special guests, to share insights about the future of storytelling at Disney Parks and beyond, focusing on the intersection of imagination and innovation.

Among those on stage for the Pixar portion of the presentation were Michael Hundgen of Walt Disney Imagineering and Pete Docter, Chief Creative Officer of Pixar Animation Studios. After providing an update on Monstropolis at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, they shared a look at the ride vehicles for the new headliner off-road Cars attraction racing into Frontierland.

“Our primary goal is creating an emotional experience for our guests,” Hundgen told the 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.”

The team 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. These are all things Lightning McQueen and Mater haven’t experienced before, like racing over rocky terrain, ascending to mountain peaks, and dodging around geysers — how do you take these real-world elements and put a Cars spin on it?

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 will eventually move and race.

“We’re using a customized production vehicle,” Hundgen continued. “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,” Michael explained.

But all this talk about cars, what do they look like?

That’s where the Pixar team steps in. For some show and tell to get the crowd revved up, Docter shared some early concept sketches with the audience, teasing 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.”

Walt Disney Imagineering also shared a first look at a model of the ride vehicle in action:

And video of a proof of concept for the new attraction: pic.twitter.com/crgjhRSq8z

— Scott Gustin (@ScottGustin) March 8, 2025

This might seem a bit, well, awkward to the uninitiated. A giant arm looming over a small car to push around a ride vehicle.

But my first thought is that this feels very purposeful.

After test footage was shown late last year at D23 Brazil, many fans assumed that this would be a trackless off-road E-Ticket. We got to sleuthing, which resulted in this article: Cars E-Ticket Trackless Off-Road Thrill Ride System for Magic Kingdom Revealed?

The bottom line is that we were confident–based on the test footage shared by Imagineering and the third party ride system we found–that Frontierland was getting a trackless Cars ride. And we weren’t the only ones–that was the consensus among the fan community.

With that added context, why Disney would release this crude video mockup now makes a whole lot more sense. To tell us all that we were wrong without saying so in as many words. It telegraphs a message to adjust expectations, which is a good thing to do early in the game so speculation doesn’t get out of hand.

That, or this is all clever subterfuge and Imagineering is slyly trying to lower expectations so they’ll be easier to exceed.

Just kidding. It’s almost assuredly the former. It’d be weird to have a big feature presentation at SXSW–a more mainstream venue–and use that outlet as a vehicle for tricking diehard Disney fans with a classic underpromise/overdeliver set-up.

Ultimately, while I appreciate seeing more of the ride vehicles–both their personality and the underlying tech (or more accurate, confirmation of what the underlying tech is not)–what I really would’ve liked to see from Pete Docter is storyboards and other inspiration from the creative minds at Pixar for the setting.

Docter is a huge, old school Disney fan. He was an animator on Cranium Command, wrote a behemoth book on Marc Davis, and is regularly spotted in the parks (we even bumped into him at Tokyo Disneyland once!). Docter could’ve shared the collaborative work Pixar is doing along with Imagineering to ensure this Cars mini-land fits into Frontierland.

I’ve mentioned before that my hope is that the environments are clearly inspired by the National Parks of the American West. That the layer of Cars themed design on top of that marries Parkitecture with classic 1950s vehicles. That there’s kinetic energy via water and other placemaking, and the sightlines work. If this is going to happen (and it almost assuredly is), let’s make lemonade out of lemons. (See my thoughts about Cars’ capacity to fit in Frontierland.)

An area and attractions themed to Piston Peak National Park evoking the era and atmosphere you’d expect to see in a rustic land themed to the American frontier, even if it’s no longer set in the precise era as it was in 1955 or 1971, is the best case scenario at this point. For me, quintessential Americana is the kind that belongs in a Disney theme park, and the U.S. National Parks are America’s Best Idea. They deserve to be celebrated, even if in fantasy-form, at Walt Disney World. Loud and dirty ATVs, not so much.

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YOUR THOUGHTS

Do you think the Cars E-Ticket tracked or trackless? What’s your reaction to new ride vehicle concept art and test videos? Thoughts on Cars rides coming to Magic Kingdom? Do you agree or disagree with our assessments? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!