Yesterday we reached back into our collective childhoods to determine who had the most rad bike. Since a lot of us refuse to grow up, and in honor of Toy Story 3 opening this Friday, today we’re going to kick it again back to our short-pants wearing days and try and figure out what your favorite car toys were. I’m sure for many of us, the answer lies not just in memory, but probably in a box or maybe a window sill somewhere around the present-day house. A trip to my garage will discover not only several thousand car magazines, but a tiny parade of Hot Wheels and  Matchbox cars as well as a few Huskys including a Citroen Safari and Buick Electra police car. The Hotwheels of course  plied the orange track that inevitably overgrew our living room, and also made such a satisfying sound when thwacked against an annoying sister’s leg. I come from an era before Hotwheels got all vertical, but I did have a “gas station” with two rubber wheels in it that could either  send a car shooting down the attached track, or launch it in an ICBM-like arc across the room. I really loved my Hotwheels, but I also had Whizzers and Whizzer Racers. Whizzers were tops, and you could rev them up and then drop the spinning gyroscope into the back of the cartoonish-looking car which would immediately pop a wheelie and spin madly across the floor. Hilarity would inevitably ensue. Another one of my favorites, but one whose name I can’t remember, was a car that had a solar cell on its roof, and came with a flashlight. I can’t remember if it steered, but you could shine the light on it and it would go. As I recall, the flashlight broke and into the closet it went. So how about you? Did you have some cool car toys when you were a kid? Maybe one of those rip-cord racers, or one of those uber-cool crashmobiles from the ’60s? Or was it just a hoop and a stick that kept your attention in between white-washings of  the fence? Either way, which car toy from your youth (or that you’re currently playing with while reading this) is your favorite? Image source: [sodahead.com]