This holiday season’s hottest tech gift is a race car that’s piloted by crickets

With the holiday season looming right around the bend, now’s the time perfect opportunity to drive a wedge between your child’s unhealthy relationship with his or her mobile device, redeeming the fact that your 21^st century yuppie parenting methods may have been the cause. Meet the Bug Racer, a “perfect marriage of nature, technology, and you,” that puts crickets behind the wheel of a race car, introducing a bit of “nature” back into your child’s overly-scheduled life.

Unlike every other uninspired RC racecar these days, Bug Racer is not piloted by with a smartphone; it’s steered by a cricket dancing around a series of motion sensors littered around the control room. If he hops to the right, the vehicle turns to right, and if he hops to the left, the vehicle turns to the left. But should he crash into something and get stuck, then the vehicle automatically reverses away from the obstacle. 

The battery-powered device uses four AA batteries and can host one to five crickets in a transparent cockpit that doubles as a livable habitat, complete with a living a feeding area and a magnified cockpit that lets children study the cricket as it drives around. Of course live crickets must be procured from the local pet shop, but an included grasping tool makes it easy to kidnap them and recruit your racecar drivers.

Bug Racer features four driving modes that shake up the routine. “Cricket In Charge,” is the flagship mode that puts the cricket behind the wheel for an unpredictable drive through the living room; “Drag Racing” limits the crickets input so the vehicle can only accelerate in a straight line, allowing kids to race their cars in a drag race; “Autodrive” overrides the motion sensor for cricket-free driving; and “light show” adds music and light to glamorize the experience to “better observe your cricket.”

The whole thing about subjugating lesser-beings to dance for our entertainment may sound a bit humiliating and cruel, but given that crickets typically exhibit a three month lifespan and are industrially bred for food, the whole thing makes for a slightly more interesting life then winding up in the bowels of someone’s pet snake. Bug Racer even provides instructions on properly caring for your racers, thoughtfully treating them as pets rather than exploited labor.

Bug Racer is exclusively available at Toys’R’Us for $35.

Source: Wired. and Gizmodo