Opinions Carveyance

Born This Way

A two-year-old, a Barbie event full of grown men, and a rabbit hole into the real science of why kids — and the adults they turn into — fall so hard for cars.

Opinions · Nature, Nurture & Horsepower · By Oliver Bacon · 21 min read

I was watching my youngest — he's two — hold court in his room the other day, surrounded by his fleet. Dump trucks, excavators, a scatter of Matchbox and Hot Wheels, all of it being methodically jammed into his older sister's dollhouse like a demolition crew that had wandered onto the wrong set. And a flood of memories hit me, because I had done exactly this. I spent whole afternoons lining cars up against the wall, building ramps, racing them down, lying with my cheek flat on the carpet to get the camera angle right on a scene I was directing in my head.

Mine had a plot. There was a white Lincoln Town Car facing off against a maroon Jaguar XJ6, and each of them arrived with a crew — an SUV, a sports car, an under-the-radar sedan, and the trusted second-in-command. Some sort of "deal" was always going down. It would inevitably collapse into a chase, good guys and bad guys, cars drifting before I had any idea what drifting was, flipping, driving up walls, full sound effects supplied at volume. It was, in retrospect, a Fast & Furious film with better dialogue and fewer plot holes — and I was maybe seven, clearly marinating in the uncensored television and movies of an '80s childhood.

Watching my son build the same instinct from scratch, decades later, I found myself asking the question that would eat my next several weeks: why? Why does a small child — especially, though not only, a boy — reach for the thing with wheels? He wasn't taught to. And where does that impulse go when the kid grows up? Because I had a strong suspicion it doesn't go anywhere at all. It just buys insurance and a bigger version.

The suspicion hardened into a story later that same day, when I took my daughter — she's four — to Mattel's headquarters in El Segundo for a Barbie event. We got there before the gift shop opened, and there was already a decent line. And something struck me as I stood in it: almost everyone in that line was a man, somewhere between 35 and 45. No other little kids. Barely another woman. I did the math and briefly assumed I'd gotten the date wrong, which triggered a very specific parental dread — the contingency-planning kind, where you're quietly rehearsing how to explain a canceled event to a four-year-old in her best outfit without exposing the childless adults nearby to a category of horror no movie has ever captured.

I asked the guy in front of me. The date was right. The doors opened, and my daughter shot straight for the Barbie aisle — while every one of those men I'd clocked in line peeled off in the same direction, toward a different aisle entirely. The Hot Wheels aisle. And, look, I went too. It was glorious: every make and model, special Gulf-liveried McLarens and Porsches strapped to little trailers, a safari build, collector editions, the works. So I did the reporter thing and asked a few of them why they were there. Some were collectors buying to hold or flip. Some were buying for their kids. Some were buying, with zero embarrassment, for themselves.

And there it was, the whole question standing in a gift-shop line: a room full of grown men who had never once outgrown the thing my two-year-old was doing on his bedroom floor. What is that? Why does it land so hard, so early, and hold on so long?

A quick, honest aside before the science, because it matters to how you read everything that follows. My wife and I have genuinely tried not to steer our kids. We didn't stock the house with trucks for the boy and dolls for the girl to manufacture the cliché. They leaned the way they leaned on their own. But I'm not naive: kids are ferocious observers, they learn by watching and listening, and it is entirely possible that we nudged them in a thousand invisible ways we'll never fully account for. Hold that thought. It turns out to be the exact fault line the researchers are still arguing over.

This rabbit hole actually began as a different one. I'd been digging into the history of Matchbox and Hot Wheels — how they started, why they feel so different, how they ended up under the same corporate roof, a story I told separately in "Scale Model Warfare." And while I was researching it, I fell across a piece that reframed the whole question for me: "Playing With Cars: How Kids Become Adults Obsessed With Machines," written by Brett Berk for Car and Driver. If the arc and several of the expert findings below feel carefully reported, that's because Berk reported them first, and much of what follows builds directly on his work. Credit where it's overwhelmingly due.

Berk opens with a confession I found deeply relatable: his first love wasn't Hot Wheels at all but Duesenbergs — those blue-chip 1930s American giants — a passion so consuming that as a kid in 1970s Detroit he did extra-credit reports on Fred and Augie Duesenberg, visited the Auburn Cord Duesenberg museum in Indiana, and had a bar mitzvah cake shaped like a Duesenberg coupe. His point, and it's the thesis of this whole investigation, is that people who love cars tend to share an origin story: the hoarding of toy cars, the compulsive naming of every make and model that rolled past. We were all once kids who fell for machinery. The question is how that happens — and whether it ever really stops.

To answer it, Berk went to someone who studies exactly this for a living. So that's where we'll go too.

Joyce Alexander was dean of the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University when she spoke to Berk; she has since moved to the University of Alabama, where she is dean of the College of Education. Her field is how children acquire the interests that end up defining them — and, just as importantly, how they lose them. Her own research language is uncannily well suited to a car magazine: she studies the on-ramps, off-ramps and roadblocks that decide whether a childhood interest survives. She was a lead researcher on a remarkable longitudinal study that tracked 215 children for sixteen years, following their hobbies from toddlerhood into adolescence to watch how passions form, harden, and — often — quietly die. As she told Berk, the timeline is startlingly early.

Eighteen months. Before most kids can string together a proper sentence, some of them have already picked a lane. And here's the encouraging part for any parent white-knuckling their child's future car-guy credentials: those early passions can be protected, but only if they're fed well. Alexander's research points to out-of-school activities acting as a kind of inoculation against losing an interest — but only when the activity stays high-quality and keeps alive the awe and curiosity that sparked it. Karting camp won't keep a kid car-obsessed if they're not learning, making friends, or shaving their lap times. Feed the wonder, or lose it.

The flip side is just as real, and quietly heartbreaking. Interests die for reasons that usually have nothing to do with the kid. Alexander describes "off-ramps" — the moment the guitar goes into the closet under a pile of clothes, the art kit vanishes under the couch, the car magazine hits the recycling — and they're often caused not by a child's fading passion but by the adults around them failing to keep up with it. She ties this partly to what she calls "social capital": the resources a family has to keep exposing a kid to richer and richer versions of the thing they love. An interest can also be crushed by accident, when the wrong person praises the wrong thing — she recounts a girl deeply into biology who kept getting recognized by her teacher for her artwork instead, until the message quietly rewired what the girl thought she was good at.

And sometimes, Alexander admits, there's simply no recipe at all. One determined parent wanted a science-minded daughter; the daughter wanted Barbies. "I'm sorry," Alexander could only offer, "this is who she is now." Which is either the most freeing or the most maddening sentence a parent can hear, depending on the day.

One of the most useful things Alexander gave Berk was a simple map of how children play. Sort the chaos of a toy-strewn floor into four buckets, and patterns start to emerge — including one that should make every car kid sit up a little straighter.

Here's the kicker Alexander delivered, and it's the kind of thing you want to laminate: kids who gravitate toward the conceptual and dramatic types — the fact-hoarders and the world-builders — tend to show stronger cognitive skills than kids in the other two groups. And those two are exactly the modes car-obsessed children live in. The one cataloging every vehicle on the road, and the one staging elaborate motorized dramas on the living-room floor. As Berk put it, with the smugness we've all earned: not that you needed more evidence that car-loving kids, and the adults they become, are geniuses.

One honest asterisk on that, because it is exactly the kind of finding that gets over-read: this is a correlation, not a receipt. Children who catalog and children who build worlds score better on the cognitive measures. That is not the same as proving the play produced the scores. The arrow may run the other way, or both ways at once — a child with a good memory for detail is precisely the child who finds memorizing every trim level satisfying in the first place. Worth saying plainly. Also not much of a consolation prize: whichever way the arrow points, the kid face-down on the carpet with a fistful of cars is keeping good company.

Berk's piece answered how interests form and survive. But it left my original, dumber question still standing: of all the things in the world, why does the small object with wheels win so consistently? For that I had to go past the car magazines and into the developmental-psychology literature — and it turns out cars are almost a perfect storm of things a developing brain is built to crave.

Start with the great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. In his model of cognitive development, a two-year-old is graduating from the sensorimotor stage — learning the world through the senses and by physically acting on objects — into the preoperational stage, where symbols take hold. A car is almost suspiciously well-suited to both. In the first stage it's the ultimate cause-and-effect machine: push it, it goes; push it harder, it goes farther; launch it off a ramp and physics itself performs for you. A toddler rolling a car across the floor is running a tiny, repeatable experiment in how their own actions bend the world. Then, as symbolic thinking arrives, that same car stops being just an object and starts being able to represent — it can fly, it can be a rocket, it can star in a carpet-bound crime drama with a maroon Jaguar as the antagonist. One toy, engineered by accident to grow with the exact developmental leap the child is making.

There is a second, subtler reason, and it has to do with what developmental psychologists call contingency — an infant's deep preference for objects that respond to what the infant does, immediately and reliably. Babies will work surprisingly hard for a toy that reacts on cue, and lose interest fast in one that doesn't. A die-cast car is close to pure contingency. It does nothing at all until you touch it, and then it does exactly what your hand told it to, every time, with no delay and no negotiation. A stuffed animal is warm but inert. A screen answers, but on its own schedule. A car is a machine for confirming that you have an effect on the world — which, when you are two years old and have almost no effect on anything, is close to intoxicating.

Then there are what researchers call schemas — repeated patterns of action toddlers run over and over to figure out how the world works. Of the nine commonly cited play schemas — trajectory, positioning, transporting, connecting, transforming, rotating, enclosing, enveloping, orientation — a toy car cleanly satisfies at least six. The trajectory schema (the deep fascination with how things move through space) is a car down a ramp, incarnate. The transporting schema (obsessively moving objects from one place to another) is every time a kid loads a die-cast truck with blocks and hauls them across the room and back. A car isn't one toy. It's a Swiss Army knife of exactly the compulsions a small brain is built to practice.

Which brings us to the part everyone actually wants to know about, and the part where honest writers slow down: the sex difference. Boys, on average, do develop intense vehicle interests more often than girls — my own line-full-of-men at Mattel was a small, unscientific data point in a very large pile. The temptation is to reach for one tidy cause. Resist it. The real science is a genuine tug-of-war, with strong evidence on both sides and researchers who openly disagree. Here's the honest ledger.

A note to save you a double-take: the Alexander in that first column is Gerianne Alexander, a psychologist at Texas A&M — no relation to Joyce Alexander above, who ran the children's-interests work. Two different researchers, two different fields, and for years the same university. Even the literature trips over it.

So what's the honest verdict? Almost certainly both, tangled together so early and so tightly that pulling them apart cleanly may be impossible. There does appear to be some real biological tilt — a modest, average nudge toward objects-that-move for boys, visible even in primates and in prenatal-hormone studies. And there is unmistakably a powerful cultural amplifier layered on top, starting the moment a nursery gets painted and the first toy truck gets handed to the boy and the first doll to the girl. The nudge is real. The megaphone is also real. And they feed each other in a loop that begins before a child can walk.

The biology may load the dice. The culture rolls them, over and over, all day long.

It's worth saying plainly, too: none of this makes it a wall. Plenty of girls love cars — the researchers are careful to stress that the difference is an average across groups, not a rule about any individual, and the overlap between the sexes is enormous. Berk himself noted that his daughter played happily with vehicles; she just tended to drive her animals around a farm rather than launch them off a ramp. My own daughter is the same. She'll play cars all day — she just insists they have somewhere to be and someone to visit when they get there. Which, honestly, is a more sensible use of a car than anything I was doing with my Lincoln and my Jaguar.

Here's the part that should make every parent feel good about the fleet of die-cast currently colonizing their floor: it isn't just play. A toy car is one of the most efficient developmental tools ever accidentally invented, quietly teaching a startling range of skills while the kid thinks they're just staging a crash.

And the beauty of it is how the same toy grows with the child. It starts as a two-dollar physics demo — push, watch, repeat. It becomes a stage for increasingly baroque pretend dramas. Eventually it turns social, as the solo carpet epics give way to games negotiated with friends. Toy cars are versatile, cheap, and — the quality no parent undervalues — pocket-sized, ready to buy ten minutes of peace at a restaurant or a doctor's office. The humble die-cast may be the highest developmental return on investment in the entire toy aisle.

So let's close the loop back where Berk and I both started — with the grown-ups. Because the most reassuring thing in all this research is that a childhood car obsession going quiet is almost never the same as it dying. Alexander found that even passions that seem to vanish frequently resurface later in life, reawakened by the warm memories they left behind. Berk lived it: his love of cars gave way to creative writing in college, then came roaring back when he started writing for car magazines — the childhood obsession and the adult career finally shaking hands. The highlight of that career, he says, was driving 1930s screen legend Gary Cooper's Duesenberg SSJ. The seven-year-old doing extra-credit reports on the Duesenberg brothers grew up to drive one. The passion didn't disappear. It just waited, patiently, for the kid to get his license and a press pass.

It is worth stopping on what that car actually is. Duesenberg built exactly two SSJs — short-wheelbase, supercharged, essentially hand-made for two customers, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, at a moment when the company was already circling the drain. Cooper's came up at Pebble Beach in 2018 and sold for $22 million, roughly $29 million in 2026 money, which made it at the time the most expensive American car ever sold at auction. Berk drove one of the two. He was, by his own account, a kid who wrote extra-credit reports about the brothers who built it. There is no cleaner version of the point this whole piece has been circling: the obsession did not mature into something more respectable. It just got access.

Which is what that line at Mattel really was, I think. Not a room of men reliving their childhood. A room of men who never actually left it — who found the on-ramp early, got it fed well enough to survive, and simply upgraded the fleet. The two-year-old jamming an excavator into a dollhouse and the forty-year-old buying a Gulf-liveried McLaren on a tiny trailer are running identical software. Only the resolution has changed.

So the next time you step on a stray Hot Wheels in a dark hallway and feel that specific small agony travel up your spine — remember what you're actually standing on. Not a toy. A cause-and-effect machine, a physics lab, a language tutor, a storytelling stage, and quite possibly the opening scene of a lifelong love affair with the automobile. Some of us just never found the off-ramp.

And the lucky few of us grew up, kept the wonder alive, and got to drive the real thing. Feed the wonder. It has excellent taste in cars.