Epic Hot Wheels racetrack was four years in the making

My son has been collecting Hot Wheels cars since he was two. He was always too busy rolling them around and crashing them into each other and walls to put the cars into his mouth. I bet today he has about 5,000 cars scattered around the house and outside in various bins and boxes. It worked out good for me since the cars are cheap and getting him one or two each week didn't affect the budget as a video game habit would. We have also spent countless hours over the years playing with Hot Wheels tracks that were never as cool once put together as they seemed in the box.

Artist Chris Burden has constructed the coolest Hot Wheels track that I have ever seen. From looking at the thing, I don't see anything that might have come out of a Hot Wheels box. Even the track looks custom made to me. The kinetic sculpture is called Metropolis II and has 1,100 Hot Wheels cars that zip around the streets of the giant city continuously. Each of the little blurs you see in the photo are Hot Wheels cars that are roughly 2-inches long.

The artwork took the artist and a team of ten assistants four years to build and is installed in Burden's studio. When my son saw this, he wanted to know if we could make on in his room. I know him, after the four-year construction process, he would walk through it like Godzilla and crush it.

[via Make]