If you ever enjoyed making intricate Hot Wheels tracks, prepare to be humbled. If you were like many children, you had Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars or something of the like, which often came with tracks you could set up. The bendy plastic tracks included turns, loops, ramps, and much more to allow you to do all kinds of cool stunts. Designer Chris Burden, however, has evolved far beyond mortal men in order to create this ridiculously detailed setup he calls the Metropolis II, shown to us by TechEBlog. Even these pictures don’t do it justice, because this “kinetic sculpture” is truly massive. Make sure to check the video at the end of the post.
At full capacity, the Metropolis II conveys 1,100 cars, over and over again. You can see that, much like a roller coaster although with a different mechanism, the course ‘ends’ with a conveyor belt pulling the cars all the way back uphill via magnets. It’s here that they are bunched up again in six lanes before being set free to traverse the custom-built city along various routes. Burden claims that the course cost millions to make, which I find hard to believe, but he also claims he’s sold it for an undisclosed number of millions, so he’s no doubt making a profit on this artwork. Taking four years to build with the work of twelve people, plenty of detailed work has gone into the structure, likely many times more than one might estimate. One of the workers notes that cars fly off the track every so often, meaning that more attention and refinement have to be given to particular areas of the track. Minute adjustments, careful filing of track sections, and a ton of other work I can’t even fathom goes into ensuring Metropolis II works perfectly. Check out even more miniature vehicular awesomeness with the Hot Wheels Video Racer and the Doodle Track Car.
