Teenage Engineering, the Swedish electronics firm, is known for its beautiful but pricey products—the bulk of which amount to functionalist art. Need a $US1600 aluminium desk? TE’s got you covered. How about a $US2,000 set of singing, wooden dolls? Again, the company is there to serve. We also wouldn’t have the Nothing Phone—arguably, one of the coolest-looking phones to ever exist—without the company’s helping hand.
Well, Teenage Engineering has debuted yet another one of its pricey playthings for adults and it’s about what you’d expect: a $US250 toy car.
The new product, which Teenage Engineering calls a “grip car,” is made with aluminium, steel, and smooth ball-bearing rubber wheels, and the company’s website says it was designed so that you can “simply grip onto the car, and move it in any direction.” Yep, that’s pretty much how a toy car works! TE also says that the car comes in red, black, and aluminium colouring, and was designed by the Danish designer Anders Hermansen.
It’s a bit unclear who the target demographic for this product is. Maybe a really rich child with weirdly minimalist tastes? A C-suite exec who needs a desk ornament but also wants to play with it in between Zoom meetings? At any rate, nobody’s saying it’s not a cool product. It just might not be what you’d call a necessity buy.
Teenage Engineering also just launched its latest music device: The EP-133 KO II synthesizer. Per The Verge, it’s $US299. It reports Teenage Engineering’s co-founder and hardware lead as saying he hopes the new product can appeal to people who just want to use it for fun.