Welcome to my kitchen. It's a humble place, and I don't do many reviews from it. I can make a good omelet, and sometimes I can even make sunny-side-up eggs without breaking the yolk, but I somehow demolish them when my grandpa is watching me. It's not even a normal kind of burning / breaking demolishing. Feathers start flying everywhere, the smoke alarm goes off and someone invariably loses a limb.

Tonight, I have the house all to myself. Instead of my normal routine of Naked Solo Hot Oil Twister with a jazz fusion soundtrack, I'm going to put together a long overdue review of one of the cooler things we saw at ToyFair : the Hot Wheels Formula Fuelers car-a-ma-jig. Despite being promoted by an overexcited guy in flame-patterned, pleather bellbottoms, the neato racecar, which was 'powered' by everyday household liquids, remained a fascinating concept. One that I had to have. One that I had to subvert to my own nefarious purposes.

Now, it's nothing like one of those potato clocks. Don't be fooled into thinking that ketchup has some kind of magical stored kinetic energy, ready to burst forth given the correct impetus. Not like potatoes.... those effers are amazing. The Formula Fueler, which retails for about 20 bucks and comes in four different colors, requires 3 AA batteries. For your 20 bucks, you get a racecar (with fuel pod), three kinds of 'nitro' fuel (in powder, liquid and pill form), a small mixing cup, a stirrer, a cleaning spongy guy, and a big intestine-lookin' eyedropper. So, where does the fuel come in, if this guy runs on batteries?

Well now... the car offers 2 modes of exciting play. There's Mode One (as accessed by a switch on the underside), in which the car will be sensitive to the fuel that you pop into its chamber. There's also Mode Two, at which the car will run at maximum speed and distance all of the time. Since I'm the kind of guy who gets overexcited when opening a new toy, I failed to read these instructions and just started pressing buttons once I'd installed the batteries (using a screwdriver). My first experience with the car was watching it careen into the kitchen door, spin around, ricochet off of the garbage, into my foot and off into the darkness of the living room (with the dreaded thorny avocado trees that we need to move inside every time there's a frost, thank you, Grandma) like a thing possessed. And I giggled. A lot. Because THIS, my friends, was a fast, durable, zany car.

Having a bit of a deeper understanding of the car in question, I set it up in the upstairs hallway, which is carpeted. I assumed that this would slow the car down a bit, temper its wild fury, deprive it of some of its machismo. Still on Mode Two, it revved its engine and sped off down the hallway, promptly knocking the moulding off of the top of the stairs. Perhaps it's immature and reveals some signs of my arrested development, but the fact that this car could effectively knock part of my house off was an instant sell.

So, I'd mastered Mode Two, in as far as I'd managed to use it to be destructive. So far, this was a car that had endured many a crash without taking a dent (nor would it scratch while my uncautious niece was playing with it for a while). It was fast, it had a good deal of power, and the sound effects that it was making were really just very neat. Car sounds, like the sounds that my neighbours make at 3 AM because they think it makes them seem cool. At maximum power, the car ran for about 50 feet. It's not a permanent acceleration - it will shut itself off before too long, no matter what you have going on in there.

Then, of course, there's Mode One. This is where you get to try your hand at some science, or at worst, some wild and fun guessing games. The instruction booklet offers a variety of suggestions to fuel the car with - mixtures of various household fluids that may or may not allow the car to run. I didn't see 'human saliva', so I sort of ignored the whole list. If you can't use spit, well, I don't know what you can use.

The most basic scientific principle behind this is electrical conductivity. The fuel pod has two metal connectors on its bottom that get plugged into the car itself. Inside the pod, the opposite ends of these connectors are separated by a few millimeters, and between them goes the liquid. So, how fast the car goes depends upon how well electrical power can be conveyed through the liquid itself, to the other connector. You'll know how well it'll go as it gives off a series of beeps and revs its engine. If you remember anything from 8th grade chemistry, this isn't that much of a mystery. Of course, having been in love all during 8th grade, I remember nothing but daisies and sunshine, so the chemistry of this remained unclear to me until about the tenth liquid that I tried. Now, I'm going to completely ruin any kind of experimentation you'd like to try to do with this car, revealing in full my conclusions and detailed lab notes (which mainly consist of drawings of robots fighting squid and making sweet love). So, if you don't want to read any further, I'll summarize it here:

I'm 22 years old and I was gleefully chasing the car around my house, rummaging through our mysterious fridge to find new liquids to experiment with, even once I knew the secret. The Formula Fueler is a very well made little beast based on an ingenious idea, and it's really very fun, no matter who you are. Well, it's probably not fun if you have some bizarre fear of liquids, but that's a problem that you have to work out on your own. I found almost no flaws with the car whatsoever, (the only slight disappointment was the relatively short running distance at maximum power), so if you're so inclined, give it a shot. The car gets a killer five out of five.

NOW, on to the good stuff.

The first liquid I tried was one of the building blocks of life itself. I'm not talking about Legos here, though I'd be mighty interested if they came in a convenient liquid form, and they're definitely one of the things that MY life is based around. Nae, I speak of water. After filling the pod with water and pressing the big, red button on the back, I found that water was not the best thing to power the car by. The car had a hard time starting and sputtered along the hall jerkily. I began to get ideas of flux capacitors and Doc Brown, chucking whatever he could get his hands on into the fuel tank of the DeLorean. Like soda....

Now, Diet Pepsi. I've head rumours that various colas are used to remove bloodstains from highways and can dissolve nails. Sure this caustic, lo-cal stuff would power a car better than water! Hell, if we were composed of 75% Cola instead of 75% water, we'd all have superpowers and be excellent lovers and have 2 extra feet just for kickin' ass. And be 12 yards tall. As it turns out, Cola WILL power the car a bit better than water, as it starts up easier and moves at a more steady pace, but it's still fairly slow and only goes as far as the water took it.

Next came the moo juice, which is probably the least appealing name you could ever give a liquid that you were supposed to drink. Now, this is a substance that's supposed to make you big and strong and have thick bones, or something. I dunno. I'm lactose intolerant, and true to my nerdy nature, milk makes me bloat. Sure a liquid accredited with such fantastic magical properties would power a car better than cola and water! So, I filled the pod with milk, feeling a bit guilty that I was pretty much wasting it. The cow from which this was massaged, nor the farmer who gently tugged on said cow's warm underside, probably did not expect the fruits of their labor to be used to power a small vehicle. Their efforts, however, were not in vain. Milk powered the car better than anything so far, and it slowly progressed to the other end of the hallway before stopping.

What's this? At the bottom of the coffeepot lay liquid gold, and just enough to fill the fuel pod. Coffee, regarded by many as more essential to life than water or reproduction. This is a liquid to which entire establishments are dedicated, so this was going to be the secret ingredient. This was going to dent the door at the end of the hall and cause as much damage as it does to my stomach. If you're realizing a theme about how badly everything effects my stomach... welcome to my life. The java, alas, only worked as well as the milk.

So, I added a bit of milk to the coffee, hoping to catalyze something explosive, and the car didn't run any better. SO, I added a bit of sugar. Maybe this car had a preference. I wasn't about to whip up a double-frap-mocha-almond-ferret-decaf for it, but I would sweeten the mix a bit. The car loudly proclaimed that it much preferred its coffee black and bitter and refused to start at all. Sugar was revealed as the white devil that it is.

Next came the soy. The LITE soy. I don't understand why my family keeps all of this DIET and LITE crap around. If I'm going to eat or drink something, I'm going to make it worth it, dammit. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is worthwhile in 'diet' form. So, I filled the pod with this pseudo-soy. Soy is from Asia. The car was most likely made in Asia. Would this confluence of origins be the right formula to power the car to its maximum potential?

As it turns out, the ancient secrets of the Orient ARE what it takes to power the car to its maximum speed. The car once again sped off, careened into things, and rocketed past a cat that seemed, at most, indifferent. I'd found one substance that seemed to work well. Would there be any others?

OJ! Filled with vitamin C! BUT.... would OJ be filled with vitamin C-ya-later?

Okay, that was really terrible, but it's not that easy to come up with a lot of clever ways to describe various kitchen liquids. You're just lucky I didn't say something slightly worse, like 'Soy ya later'. Which I just said, so deal with it. Anyhow, OJ only managed to power the car as well as milk or coffee.

Then, I found THIS in my fridge. Lord knows that this isn't something I'd ever buy or eat. I'm assuming that this is the stuff that allows old folks to cheat death for another week or so. Come to think of it, I've never seen anyone eat it either. Perhaps it's something that we just have to buy to keep the fridge gods appeased. Gradually, the level in the jar diminishes, week by week, and hopefully, we'll notice it before it vanishes entirely and the gods take their vengeance by giving us eggs with bloody yolks or spoiling our milk.

If it's not that, I don't have a clue.

Either way, it powered the car as well as the soy did. Did these salty liquids hold the key? I once again filled the pod with water (which barely powered it at all), except this time, I added a bit of salt. This also performed as well as soy did, so my hypothesis was correct.

This didn't stop me from trying my own, home-made saliva in the mix. Yes, I spit into the pod, and my saliva apparently has the same value as milk or coffee. I'm not sure exactly what to think about this. I may have to start bottling it. I'd call it Uncle Collin's Power Elixir, good for what ails ya' (*if not drinking enough human spittle is your particular disorder, otherwise, I don't think this will help much). Twelve bucks a bottle.

I was going to try some mackerel juice, but I withheld for two reasons. One, I didn't want my car to smell like fish until the end of time (the stink of giardineria is still in the eyedropper), and two, mackerel is not a toy and I didn't want to piss off the Moroccans. Those guys are surly. Plus, I wanted to save this particular snack for a later date.

My final conclusions? I managed to play with this car for over an hour, trying out at least 15 different liquids, total. The pod was always easy to clean with a bit of water, and should you not be certain about how clean it is, you can always fill it up with water and give it a test run. If it's clean, it'll react like pure water and sputter along roughly. There's still a bunch of liquids I'd like to try. The instructions list about six levels of power, and I think I'd only found 3 or 4, all told, so I don't know what the missing levels look like. Therein lies the chemical challenge, not to power the car, but to be able to adjust your formula to explore more power levels. If I was going to add anything to the package, I'd add two more fuel pods. As it stands, you have to spill out your concoction in order to use a new one. It would make comparisons a bit easier if you could switch out three fuel pods without re-mixing them.

Ingenious and a ton of fun, the Formula Fuelers from Hot Wheels get a nice five out of five. Enjoy!

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