Toyota's amazing Camattes are the toy cars we want and need

Cartoon-cute fire engines and hot-dog vans in nursery-bright colours aren’t normal TG territory. But we’re all in favour of encouraging smart youngsters into joining the next generation of car engineers. Younger the better, Toyota thinks. So it went to this year’s Tokyo Toy Show with a project called Camatte.

So far, the Camatte vehicles have been a range of kid-scale cars, about 3m long, in body styles from sporty to retro to quasi-utility. The shape-shifting was done by swapping out sets of quick-mount body panels. This year, Camatte has an augmented-reality app that lets kids design their own modular vehicles, then virtually drive them around a physical course.

The first step is to get into this year’s real Camatte, the Hajime. It might look a touch Jeep-alike, but the Hajime, like all Camattes, feeds the youngster’s supercar fantasies with a McLaren-F1-style three-seater layout. The grown-ups sit in the back, their legs either side of junior’s. On climbing into the Hajime, they can adjust the pedal reach, and, once belted in, they can saw at the wheel.

But though the Hajime has an electric motor and does actually run, they’re not allowed to wreak kiddie carnage by hooning around the Toy Show. Instead they get their photo taken and climb out. Next step is to dive into the app and get designing. They can customise from among 13 body styles and a dozen colours.

So it’s unlikely they’ll turn out anything the same as their mate's or little sibling's efforts.

Then they get to ‘drive’ their creation. They take the app and steer their way around the roads laid out on Toyota’s Toy Show stand. The tablet superimposes them and their family grinning or gurning in the vehicle they just designed. If we’d done that as kids it’d have had us bouncing off the rev-limiter of excitement. In more elaborate form, this is a privilege normally granted only to fashionably haired grown-up designers in their high-dollar CAD and virtualisation suites.

So far Toyota has been curiously unforthcoming as to what’s to be gained from the Camette project, either for the company or for society. Even the augmented reality app is hardly at the very forefront of these things, so it’s not a pure technology research project. More likely, it will get kids excited about the prospect not just of growing up into driving their own cars, but of engineering and designing them too.