I got this toy for a quarter at a thrift store. It somewhat amuses, or anyway puzzles, the kitties. I wanted to try to describe it, but then it occurred to me that somebody out there probably already has a name for it and maybe I don't have to reinvent the English language just today. It turns out to be a friction flip car. You rub the wheels on the floor in the direction you want it to go and it keeps going, making a vroom noise that is delightful to oversized children like myself but somewhat alarming to kitties. It also flips if it hits anything and either comes back or flips again and again. One side is styled like a race car; the other seems like a pickup to me but toy designers feel that it's an off-road vehicle.
Now this is an extremely delightful toy for a quarter, but you should maybe google friction flip car. People are asking remarkable amounts of money for what is a zany but pretty simple toy. Not a king's ransom or anything, but way more than a quarter. Also nobody seems to sell my model anymore. This suggests, since it's in good shape, that somebody bought it for a child long ago, it got ignored and then finally given away years later. This works for me. My Dollar Tree toy car, which you roll backwards to wind it up and then let it go, amuses the cats to some degree but it doesn't work on carpets, so we can only play in the kitchen. The flip car works on carpets, too. If only the cats were as childish as I am, we would have such fun. Perhaps a little catnip oil...
Anyway, the point was my attempts to describe the thing. Actually, "toy car that flips" got me where I wanted to go, and I didn't have to figure out how to incorporate the Vroom aspect. What puzzled me was that there was no manufacturer's or distributor's name anywhere on the toy, just a five digit number that didn't push any of Google's buttons. Ah well... another mystery.
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