A mall find in Ottawa.

The PlasmaCar did not begin as a Canadian design. According to English Wikipedia, which cites the Ottawa Business Journal and a KPMG Enterprise profile of the founder, the Ottawa entrepreneur Timothy Kimber met Bin Chen in December 2002. Chen imported inexpensive products from China and sold them at a shopping mall in the Ottawa area, and one of them was an unusual ride-on toy that moved when its rider turned the steering wheel back and forth. It was not selling well in North America, and Kimber negotiated the rights to distribute and market it himself.

The toy was then called the Fun Car, Wikipedia’s article on the product says, and Kimber gave it a new name. He borrowed it from consumer electronics: in the early 2000s the plasma television was the gadget of the moment, and the ride-on became the PlasmaCar. The company he set up to sell it took a related name, PlaSmart — pronounced “Play Smart,” the same article says.

At the start of 2003, Kimber founded PlaSmart and showed the PlasmaCar at the Canadian Toy and Hobby Show, a trade fair for toy retailers. PlaSmart’s own archived “About” page dates the company’s beginning to “the introduction of The Original PlasmaCar in 2003,” and that phrase — The Original PlasmaCar — is the name the company used for the toy on its website.

Wikipedia reports that Kimber has said the company chose to spend its first two years learning the Canadian toy trade rather than moving straight into the United States. In 2005 PlaSmart attended the New York Toy Fair and began distributing in the US. That spring, on 14 March 2005, the technology site Gizmag, now New Atlas, ran a story headlined “PlasmaCar for tots uses innovative steering for propulsion.”

Steering as the engine.

The PlasmaCar’s idea is its drive. It has no pedals, no batteries and no gears; the rider sits low on a plastic body and turns the steering wheel from side to side, and the car moves. English Wikipedia’s article on the toy explains the mechanism. The car has six wheels, but only four touch the ground. The two at the very front sit clear of the floor and act as stabilisers if the rider leans forward or meets a kerb. The steering wheel turns a second pair of wheels, mounted on a lever so that they sit behind the axis of the steering column.

When the rider twists the wheel, those offset wheels push sideways against the ground, and part of the ground’s reaction pushes the car forward. Wikipedia compares the motion to an in-line skater pulling the skates inward, or a skateboarder carving a series of tight turns. The rear wheels simply roll. The article says the car runs best on a smooth, flat surface, indoors or out.

In that design the steering wheel is both the control and the source of motion. Wikipedia’s article also records that, within a month of taking on the toy, Kimber had produced a company name, a website, marketing materials and a demonstration video for it.

PlaSmart grew around that one toy. In 2006, Wikipedia says, it moved into an Ottawa office and warehouse and began selling in Germany, its first market outside North America. A press release from PlaSmart dated 5 June 2010 announced a permanent showroom in Kowloon, Hong Kong, and described the company as “a global distributor, manufacturer and designer” of toys; it named the lines PlasmaCar, I-Gami, Perplexus and Doodle Décor. In April 2012, Wikipedia says, PlaSmart closed its Ottawa warehouse and began shipping North American orders from warehouses in Pennsylvania and California.

Design and documentation.

Outdoor play and ride-on toys sit in a part of the toy trade where the product is meant to leave the house: things that are thrown, flown, launched, pushed, pedalled or ridden in gardens, parks, driveways and beaches. Many of the names in this field began with a single object and built a brand around it, while others grew into wider ranges of moulded, sewn or wooden goods sold through toy shops, garden centres and general retailers.

Because these toys are used outdoors and seen from a distance, their identities tend to lean on bright, saturated colour and simple, bold names that read on a box, a deck or a canopy. Behind the names, ownership can change over time, and design, sales and manufacturing are often in different places, so the country on the box and the country of production may not be the same.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — who started it, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its look has developed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

The Original PlasmaCar.

The PlasmaCar sits inside a wider PlaSmart range. Wikipedia lists the PlasmaBike, a balance bike; Fun Slides carpet skates; the Original Doodle Art colouring posters; and games including Morphology. PlaSmart’s archived “About” page, from the early 2010s, described the company as “a global toy distributor specializing in smart, simple, toys and games,” and gave its working rule as “under promise and over-deliver” to retailers. Wikipedia sums up the range as battery-free toys that fit a “smart and simple” philosophy.

The brand’s story is also a story about a name. The ride-on existed before PlaSmart, as the Fun Car; what Kimber added was a distribution company, a trade-show launch and a name that tied a plastic children’s car to the plasma screens then reaching shops. The company name repeats the trick, folding “play” and “smart” into a single word with a capital S in the middle.

Where the cars are made today is not something PlaSmart’s published pages state, and this guide makes no claim about it. The documented origin is an importer of products from China, according to Wikipedia; the 2010 press release calls PlaSmart a manufacturer as well as a distributor and designer, in its own words.

For a design guide, PlasmaCar shows how a name and a single clear mechanism can carry a brand. Compare Radio Flyer, the Chicago maker of red wagons and ride-ons, and Little Tikes, the Ohio maker of moulded plastic play vehicles. For this guide we use a bright red, a blue and a yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PlasmaCar’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.