Today, the 'futuristic' ride still spews out gas fumes. Disney says it is testing new electric prototypes.
Disneyland will soon begin testing electric prototypes on its Autopia ride, an attraction in Tomorrowland that lets riders "drive" tiny cars around a track. For Matt Novak of Gizmodo, this begs the question: what took so long?
Autopia was born in 1955, when Tomorrowland purported to portray the future of 1986. "But the Autopia ride has largely remained the same since it was first introduced, with a few incremental improvements here and there. In 1977, for example, a Disney engineer replaced the bearings of the cars’ axles with a more durable bearing material, according to an annual report from NASA highlighting how space tech has improved private industry."
But aside from adding guardrails to prevent the ride from being a free-for-all, little else has changed. The cars have remained gas-powered, even though other parks switched: Hong Kong Disneyland's Autopia ride was fully electric before it closed in 2016. In 2024, Disneyland said the ride would go fully electric by 2026, but no progress was made on that plan. Even if the ride switches to hybrid vehicles, is it truly a vision of the "future"?
Read the full story: Why the Hell Has It Taken So Long for Disneyland’s Autopia to Go Electric?
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