As you’ve no doubt guessed, today’s Ask has sprung from the current Cozy Coupe kerfuffle. David’s own little tike has one of the Little Tikes cars – in the traditional mustard and ketchup scheme, thank you – but I do wonder if Delmar (not his real name) will remember it, being a toddler at all. I’m quite certain he’ll remember the ride-ons that follow (certainly this one), however, as the tools of kid-mobility are core memories for most of us, I believe.
Great swathes of us had some form of Marx Big Wheel, I’m sure, or one of the many knock-offs of the original blow-molded trike. Older readers may have been first-owners of metal pedal cars, and many 70s’ kids logged plenty of wheel time in hand-me-down genuine sheet-metal machines.
I bet far, far fewer of you inherited your ride from Russia. Antti Kautonen:
My dad brought this as a souvenir from post-Soviet Russia, probably in 1993 based on the plates. It’s a relatively popular pedal car, often seen in worse nick than ours. You can hook up a battery to power the headlights, but I can’t remember if we ever did. The original steering wheel broke off at some point and got replaced with a random red one. I’d like to fix it up for my kid, but OEM steering wheels for these are hard to get. Maybe it needs a wooden Nardi wheel in kid size.
I love that! The ride-ons of my youth included exactly one pressed-steel pedal vehicle, but it was a tractor, not a car. And it was not as fun as the plastic machines in the stable I shared with my sister. We each had our own Big Wheels, but we split seat time in one of the craziest kid-powered contraptions of the 1970s: the Marx Wild Rider.
This six-wheeler was hand-cranked, and was a reasonable facsimile for both the moon buggies of Space:1999 and the daily driver of The Banana Splits. Each crank drove the middle wheel via a chain, and by varying the speed of each crank, the Wild Rider would turn as tight or wide as you like, or even pirouette. What a machine.
A much later arrival on the scene was the Green Machine, which later became a Huffy product. It was the bigger, badder, but ultimately (to me) less satisfying follow-up to the Big Wheel. It was very cool with its rear-steer setup, but not very comfortable to ride, nor as efficient as the Big Wheel at putting power into the pedals. So, not a favorite.
Definitely favorites: the Sears go-kart and mini bike that came later when I was nine or so. I had a single-seater kart, and later the yellow bike above. It was absolutely miserable to ride off-road with that rigid frame and fork, but it was a blast to hot-foot around the oval I wore into the backyard.
What Were Your Favorite Ride-On Toys As A Kid?
Top graphic images: Marx
Big Wheel was the first ride I remember, then a pedal truck some older kids stole just so they could smash it. While a valuable lesson about how much people suck and it fueled the flame of already burning misanthropic anger (I already had PTSD), that stuff’s ordinary. In 4th grade, I won a go cart from a Wrangler jeans-sponsored raffle at the defunct Ann & Hope department store. It had something like a 3 hp Tecumseh with a fiberglass Aerobird stock car body in blue and yellow Wrangler livery with “Jeans Machine” it had emblazoned on the back, but we called it the “Wrangler Strangler”. It was quite the production to take it anywhere as the two back bench seats had to be removed from the ’85 Voyager (and the hatch still had to be tied closed), so parents of friends would have to drive them in their car, which meant they’d either have to drop the kids off and come back or hang around while we took turns at a high school parking lot and access roads on the weekend or wherever we could go without getting kicked out by security immediately or hang around talking to my father the psychopath, so it got the most use being driven illegally around the neighborhood. It was the ’80s and everyone wasn’t a whiner with a stick up their asses back then, so we never got in trouble for it, though we also weren’t excessively stupid about it and didn’t do it often.
My daily was my BMX, though. IIRC, it was just a black Columbia, but it took a beating for quite a while until that was also stolen, which I laughed about initially because it was pretty beat with exposed plies for much of the “tread”, rust, and broken spokes and the thought that it was that much better than whatever the thief had was comical. Luckily, I had a spare Frankenstein BMX bike I made for the neighborhood to use entirely out of parts I picked out of the trash (the perks of walking to and from school) and I had largely gotten too tall for a 20″ BMX, anyway. Funny story with the theft, I later found out the kid who took it did it because he didn’t like me, which should’ve occurred to me as a more likely scenario than envy. He was this wussy WT POS who later went on to kill two people, one a homeless guy he stomped to death for the hell of it and the other a kid my youngest sister was friends with as part of some supposed gang initiation (I swear, I didn’t grow up in the hood). Because he wasn’t the only one involved and pled or some other sissy shit, he spent barely any time in prison and I heard a rumor I don’t want to look up and find is true that he’s got a successful business in some trade today. I somehow knew he would kill someone some day and that I should have taken him out when I was 10—I would have saved two lives had I done that. Oh, and I wouldn’t have had that bike stolen. So it goes.
Man, I thought most of my stories border on tragedy. Yours is actually tragic. I hope the PTSD issues have been dealt with. Godspeed, fellow Autopian.
Thank you. After around 4 years after finally finding a competent therapist that wasn’t just a drug dealer, I processed it. That itself was quite the adventure as the mind is a complex machine and can do some weird stuff. In time, I’ve become grateful for all of it and that it wasn’t so much worse, as it could have been. I’m always looking to help others with it any way I can, even if it’s just talking about it and throwing out some dark humor probably nobody else gets.
Maybe not in the spirit of the question, but being a farm kid, my favorite ride-on toy was a Suzuki King Quad ATV. I think I was 6 when we got it, and before I turned 7, I was regularly riding all over the farm. Good times.
My one was fun. My Father was a housemaster at boys boarding school, there was a full suite of workshops and staff. Also bored young men. So. A fancy pram gave itself to the cause, as did a mahogany wardrobe. the thing ended u.p with sliding pillar front suspension,damped trailing arms at the back. a three speed chain drive (my mother had a Frazer Nash which got looked at a bit). I think that toecutter of this parish would have liked it when he was eight.
Honda ATC 90. Got it when I was about 10 or 11. My brother and I each had one, until a kid from a visiting family drove it into the windmill at high speed and bent the forks back enough that the front wheel was touching the engine.
Of course that happened the day they were leaving, and never said a word about it, so we got blamed for it and it never got repaired. Thanks Reed or Renae.
It’s amazing none of us kids ever seriously injured or killed ourselves on those things, and it’s no wonder the modern versions have four wheels.
Sure was a lot of fun while it lasted, though.
My cousins had an ATC 90. Their parents bought it for use on the “farm” in Sulphur, Indiana – really just a hilly property with a pond where they could relax on the weekends. It was not too far from Louisville, where they lived at the time. We had some fun times on that rig and somehow never killed ourselves. They found out that it would float (upside-down though) when one of the cousins couldn’t stop and put it in the pond. They sold the farm shortly after moving to Chicago. It still got some use in the wintertime, towing kids around on sleds and saucers in the streets of their ritzy North Shore suburb…
Thinking about it, Reed did get taken to the ER after he side swiped a barbed wire fence on it.
I had a Raleigh trike. Not the kind with the cranks directly on the front wheel—this was a proper chain-drive “granny’ trike, but kid-sized. Candy-apple red. Then I learned how to ride a bike and my sisters inherited it.
With a boot(trunk) for putting important stuff in.
First I had a Little Red Wagon (!), a Green John Deere Tractor (Meh) and a Hobby Horse (Yeehaw!)
I also had a massive red steel Texaco Airport Tanker Truck with a cab that tilted to turn the front wheels – so I rode that too.
Then I had red Tricycle, and for my 4th B’day a Red Beetle pedal car like the one in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” that I got after watching “The Love Bug”
Then I had a little blue bike w/ training wheels – until Dad took them off for some annoying reason and I had scraped up knees and palms too for what would not be the last time (and then Mom started buying me those awful Toughskins with the reinforcements in the knees that would start cracking and peeling after the second wash and they would scratch my knees worse than if I had just gotten scraped knees in a crash which I could always avoid)
Then my little Sister got a Big Wheel and I pulled the seat back off and rode the shit out of that stupid little thing (She messed with my Legos – so payback)
Then I got a silver 10 speed bike, and later started riding my Dad’s green 5 speed bike.
But my favorite was that little Red Beetle.
Gas powered Go-Kart. Mine was basically a moving dolly with a 3hp or 4hp Briggs and Stratton. Absolute death trap that everyone in my neighborhood ripped around on. Sigh… adulting sucks
My Dad brought home a go-kart he bought at a garage sale. I loved that thing!
Then the motor blew up. Dad procured another one somewhere (probably another garage sale), but this one was… different.
The motor it came with was the standard 3-4hp motor with a governor. This one was EASILY 8hp. Maybe 10. And no governor.
That thing would RIP. I remember blasting down our neighborhood street next to a car, and the driver kept looking over at me incredulously because I was pulling away from him.
Eventually, I jumped it, got some serious air, and snapped the rear axle on landing. End of go-kart. Alas…
And people still talk about Marxism like it’s a bad thing!
As a tween I had a go-kart (that my dad built) with a 5hp Briggs & Stratton engine; that got me started driving.
A few years before that, though, I had the opportunity to ride a Honda XL70. This was a 70cc dual-purpose (aka enduro) bike; it had lights and turn signals but even now I can’t imagine how useful it would have been on a paved road.
That was *mumble* years ago. The go-kart is long gone but I still have motorcycles. 🙂
Little Tykes had this really neat semi-truck that was blue and white and was a ride-on toy sometime in the early 90s. We had really smooth wood floors in our rectangle shaped house and I’d blast from one end to the other in that thing all day.
I never owned a Big Wheel of my own, nor any other ride on until I could ride a bike. But in preschool we had this one thing that was out of this world, hand cranked like the ATV in the article, except I remember it had just one big wheel at each side and a caster front and rear to keep you level. I never got to spend anywhere near as much time in that thing as I wanted, but when I got seat time in it it was great. Zero-radius turns, the crank handles were maybe one-half out from the hub so the speed was decent. It was nearly immobile for my pudgy little arms on anything but the smooth composition floor indoors, but on that floor it was like a magic carpet.
I just had a regular cheap-ass plastic Big-Wheel.
I had a bunch of 20″ BMX-style pedal-bikes, but I liked to make jumps out of stacked concrete blocks and sheets of plywood and jump over garbage cans so I broke a lot of frames and forks.
We had a VW rabbit pedal car and a Smurf mobile pedal car. At 5 we got a BMX, and at 10 we got to pick out a 10 speed at any garage sale we saw one. I had a red huffy, then a marron Fuji road bike.
I had a pea gravel driveway on a class-5 gravel road, and the closest pavement was the highway at the bottom of the mountain we lived on. So I didn’t get too many of the cool ride-on toys because hard plastic wheels just don’t work off pavement.
But my Huffy Thunder 50 BMX style bike was freaking awesome.
I had a Knight Rider “KITT” big wheel when I was 5. We lived close to my elementary school, my parents let me ride KITT to my kindergarten open house where I introduced myself as Michael Knight and my dad as Boomer Esiason…
Tell me you’re from Cincinnati without telling me you’re from Cincinnati…
Actually far from it. As a kid thought the Bengals helmets looked cool.
Thank you for the honesty about the Green Machine. I just realized I’ve been carrying around residual shame for the last 50 years that my new Green Machine wasn’t as fun for 7 year old me than my old Big Wheel.
The front wheel could never get traction. Thought it was just me.
Thanks Peter—I feel spiritually lighter now having that load lifted from me.
It depends on whether you consider teenagers as kids. If so, then my favorite ride-on toy was named Karen.
I just had a basic tricycle, and of course, all metal except for the tires and the hand grips. Then it was bicycles of slowly increasing sizes. Before my license, friends had mini-bikes that I rode. Then my first motorcycle, a Honda Dream 305cc, at the age of 16!
I had the Spider-Man version of Green Machine. Red wheels, lever steering. Never saw another one like it.
I was horribly spoiled by my grandparents (first grandkid) so I had a garage worth of ride-on toys. Nothing motorized though.
A standard Hot Cycle
The Spider-man cycle.
AMF “Hot Seat”
pedal Jeep
pedal tractor with trailer
pedal F1 looking car thing
Lots of bicycles including a bad-ass BMX
Oh God, the Green Machine. A vehicle for small children whose sole purpose was to teach them that breaking the rear end loose is fun. I had one and loved it.
All I ever had was a bicycle, and even then not a great one – my dad worked in the airlines and brought one home from Indonesia. It had all kinds of doo-dads like reflectors and fenders and looked really cool but fell apart basically right away.
I still miss my yellow Kettcar.
Kettcar FTW! My son is almost 11 years old and has just outgrown mine from 1978, but I’m keeping it for the grandkids…
Came here to post the same thing! I loved my Kettcar. Being able to powerslide (well, kind of) pulling that hand brake. I need an adult sized version.
Unfortunately Kettler is a shadow of its former self after it went bust twice in a row. The new Kettcars look nice, but they don’t disclose the COO except for one model that’s built in Austria (bad sign), the old factory in Ense-Parsit has been closed down for good.
Berg comes to mind as a possible alternative unless you’re taller than 210 cm (6 ft 10 in). But they’re rather… er, pricey.
https://www.berg.com/de/gokarts/berg-xl-gokart?page=1
Wow, I just noticed they even have a US page. Bad news for Delmar (NHRN) though, they do not sell the Jeep version in the US.
https://us.bergtoys.com/collections/xl-pedal-karts
Those are cool but frankly I’ll take an adult size pedal cart before I spend that much lol
Easy, little tikes spourt coupe. Yellow. Pedal driven front wheels and a crazy lever steering setup with rear wheel steering. Could really toss that thing around. None of that cozy coupe crap from me.
A bicycle.
Big Wheel, then to bikes, then a Honda Trail 50, then a Honda CR(?) 125
Big Wheel, definitely the Big Wheel.
The machine that taught Gen X how to drift a front-wheel-drive.