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As a child, playing with mini remote-control cars definitely made you the coolest kid on the block. You could drive over almost any surface, reach top speeds in a matter of seconds, and send your animals chasing after them (or perhaps the cars chased the pets?) much to the irritation of adults

Now, as “responsible” adults, we don’t get much of a chance to play with toy cars anymore, unless that toy car has been turned into a real, drivable, 1:1 scale car. This road machine modeled after the Aero Avante won’t be seen running around any toy tracks, as it drives on real roads at speeds over 100 miles per hour!

There’s nothing cooler than seeing your childhood toys as fully-functioning gadgets and machines. One of the most popular mini-cars in Japan is the Aero Avante, a sleek blue racecar with big wheels and a serious need for speed.

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The Aero Avante is one of many cars classified as mini-4WD or miniyonku (ミニ四駆) as they are called in Japan. These speedy toys are battery-powered, non-steerable electric racecars which follow the path of the track thanks to the high walls and horizontal side wheels. The toys, which are a serious hobby in Asia and growing in popularity around the world, are generally built and tuned to race against your own time or other cars.

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These zippy mini-cars can run as fast as 65 km/H (40 MPH) but that is nothing compared to the 180 km/H (111 MPH) the adult version can reach.

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Under the supervision of Tamiya themselves, a team decided to make a full-size, distinctly non-mini 4WD Aero Avante. They had one simple goal: “to share the joy and delight of the experience with mini 4WD fans all around the world.” As you might expect, rigorous effort went into making sure the full-size version was an exact replica of its miniature counterpart; if there were nothing around it to gauge the scale of the car, you might think it was a shiny version of the mini 4WD!

And now, after months of intense labor, custom fittings and original designs, the group was able to test it out on the roads.

You can practically feel the child-like glee as men turn back into giddy boys when this car goes driving by. Sure, those horizontal wheels serve no purpose in the full-scale version and are probably actually a hindrance in terms of aerodynamics, but the Aero Avante just wouldn’t be complete without them!

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Those who like what they see can check out more videos from the website that documented the design process all the way from the beginning. Just watching them in action has us creating a mental list of possible toys we’d love to see scaled up next. What would be on your list? Let us know in the comments section below!

Source: Tamiya.sp
Screenshots: Tamiya, Tamiya.sp, YouTube/TAMIYAINC