Best Hot Wheels Tracks: Teach Your Kids to Love Cars and Physics

The variety of tracks extends to the pricing as well, as the cars are right around a buck and you get tracks starting around the cost of a dozen cars. You can get extreme and spend a couple hundred dollars if it suits you. No matter what you pick, Hot Wheels Tracks make perfect gifts for the kids in your life, either young or young at heart. Here are the best around.

It's hard to go wrong with Hot Wheels and tracks for them when it comes to gift giving. I have years of experience with the brand and my son has over 3,000 cars scattered around our entire house. All that firsthand experience informed the decisions in this guide. I looked for things like high speeds, a variety of obstacles, and stunts.

Most of these are built around the same components, so quality and ruggedness are going to be the same across the board. As with so many things, Hot Wheels is constantly releasing new products, so this will be updated on a fairly regular basis. So whether it's holiday, birthday, or just normal shopping, we'll try and keep this the go-to resource for Hot Wheels tracks and playsets.

This kit doesn't have a mechanical gorilla or fire-breathing dragon, but it does have loops and Indiana Jones-like boulders. It has enough tracks that you can get creative with your track design. The two motorized boosters can keep cars going as long as you keep feeding them batteries.

This track can be easily expanded by either ordering more basic track pieces or combining it with another set to make a super track. The set includes one car, but how many people don't have another Hot Wheels car at home? Hot Wheels claims the age range for this track is 6—12 years old, but we all know that the top number is just a suggestion.

Less expensive doesn't necessarily mean less fun. You can still race cars side by side and the scoring system adds another element of excitement as flags shoot up in the air as the cars pass by. Another positive of this set is that it is entirely kid-powered, so you don't have to worry about stocking up on batteries.

Like most Hot Wheels tracks, not all cars are going to work, but part of the fun is seeing which cars are fast, which are slow, and which ones won't work at all. This set doesn't take up as much space as others and is relatively simple to assemble.

According to Hot Wheels, this is the biggest motorized track it has ever sold. It takes up 5 feet by 3 feet of floor space, we're inclined to believe them. This is also a fast-track dual-power booster that shoots cars around the figure-8 track. There are also jumps and the center section has crash areas to keep things interesting.

Those big booster motors do require a lot of juice, so you'll need to have fresh batteries on hand all the time to keep this thing going. The set includes two cars, and for the price, it should.

If your Hot Wheels fan likes crashes, this a good set for them. Cars are catapulted onto the track where they either avoid other cars in the three loops or collide and send both cars flying. The motorized center section will keep cars looping away almost indefinitely. so you can call this kinetic art if you would like. We like that there are even spots on the track to store cars not in use.

This track is on the higher end of the price scale, but some of that may be blamed on it being an Amazon exclusive. That said, this kit can be added to another track, but it might be difficult to keep a continuous circuit going since the triple loop returns on itself.

This is a package of 40 feet of Hot Wheels track, letting your kids go old school and build tracks down the stairs and around the furniture in whatever way their imagination takes them. The newer style locking mechanism is easier to use and more secure than the version I had as a kid, so you won't have to worry about the strips coming apart after just a few runs.

Obviously, besides racing cars, this set will also insight sword fights, and drum solos, so the fun will never end.

Deciding on a favorite Hot Wheels track is like deciding on a favorite dessert; they all have something good to offer and a lot of comes down to personal preference. Because of the variety it offers in building different tracks, and having the ability to do a single track, or side-by-side racing, the Hot Wheels Track Builder Total Turbo Takeover Set took Best Overall. If you are looking for a less expensive choice, but still want to be able to race with friends, the Hot Wheels Super Speed Blastway Track Set is a great set.

Buying a Hot Wheels track is almost always a winning bet, but there probably are a few things to consider. Budget is an obvious one, so I'll let you figure that one out, but here are a few more things to be on the lookout for.

Both motorized and manual-power have their positives. Having a track that automatically launches the cars into action makes it feel more premium and kids of all ages love motorized things; it's part of the reason we love cars at all. However, most of the sets are battery-powered and go through them like water. A manual set can make racing feel more competitive as it really is mono a mono.

If you're looking for Christmas Morning shock-and-awe, you're going to be tempted to buy the biggest thing in the toy aisle. Remember, this thing is going to provide hours of fun, meaning it will be sitting on the floor somewhere that you may have to step over constantly. Hot Wheels usually doesn't give a footprint of its tracks, so you will have to do some estimating based on photos.

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