Children love animals and things with wheels, so it makes sense that they would love the combination of the two. Indeed, there is something enduring about a stuffed animal that you can drive around.
Andrew Renz is the creative mastermind behind Blast Around, a company that makes more-durable versions of motorized stuffed animals. He started building them when his friend Dave spotted them in the mall and decided he wanted his own. When Andrew dissembled the “tragically horrible” mass-market rideable stuffed animals, he realized he could do much better. And so he set out to create his own, this time with “lights and cool animal noises.”
My first encounter with Blast Around happened a few months ago. My dog spotted Renz riding one and immediately tried to sniff its butt. Like seeing a nudist on a bicycle, I wrote it off as one of those “only in San Francisco” things and kept walking. My mom thought it might be George Hotz, but it seemed incredibly off-brand. As much as I longed to ride the beast, I knew it wasn’t a question I could just ask a stranger.
I finally got to test one out during Potrero Hill’s annual Bring Your Own Big Wheel, an annual party where adults and children ride Big Wheels down the most crooked street in the city. I did not ride it down SF’s most crooked hill — it’s not a Big Wheel, so that would have been cheating — but I did joyride around the park. I was fully enamored by the experience. Yes, drunk adults are like children — but you don’t have to be a child to enjoy riding a giant stuffed animal. How often do you get asked, “Would you like to ride this hippo?” And why the hell would you say no?
Andrew’s garage looks like a Toys“R”Us–themed episode of American Horror Story set in a small maker space. Lumpy, oversize plushes are squeezed into shelves. Their smiling faces look delightfully macabre in coordination with their suboptimal living arrangement. Plus, you know they’re going to get cut up later.
Apparently, building these creatures from scratch is easier than rehabilitating the cheap Chinese-manufactured builds. Every Blast Around critter has a hand-welded chassis wrought of mountain-bike parts that can support up to 300 pounds. Andrew has a menagerie of tools that cut metal in very specific ways so that they can fit together perfectly. If you look under the paw (get it? as opposed to under the hood?), you’ll find an engine that runs on 36-volt e-bike batteries. And unlike the cheaper models, they have brakes.
The animals all have names. There’s Poncho the pink panther, George the monkey, Simba the lion, and Harry the hippo. And inside every Poncho, George and Simba you’ll find a Raspberry Pi that controls the LED lights that rim their paws. The controls are simple for the rider. Twist the handlebar to accelerate, turn to steer and squeeze the hand break to stop. Push the button for animal noises. Advice: push the button a lot.
There’s an organic trajectory to Blast Around’s success. Andrew showed them off at GlowCon, and people “flipped out.” There he met a Union Square event director who loved the critters so much that he wanted to feature them. During a two-month break from full-time work, Andrew decided to convert the hobby into a business. Since then, the animals have gone everywhere from the Worlds Fair Nano to the March for Science.
Andrew is nearly exactly what you’d expect. He’s the kind of quiet intellect that thrives off of building things. He daylights as a software architect but is equally deft as an architect of physical machines. His explanations of what goes on under the paw display an effortless understanding of how things fit together. It feels simultaneously like I could never be smart enough to build these things but also like I could build these things tomorrow if I could just get excited enough.
But you don’t become this technically proficient overnight. Andrew’s prolific building began with LEGO Technic sets, and by high school, he had obtained a welding certification. His uncle was the machine-shop foreman at UC Davis and would encourage him to teach himself how to learn new welding skills (while making sure he didn’t chop his arms off). As a result, Andrew has become the guy you want to take to Burning Man because he’ll build a handheld flaming tennis-ball cannon. And indeed, he’s gone to Burning Man every year this past decade. His first project was repurposing a car into a driving rocket with over 2,000 LED lights on the sides and the nose.
Imagine a graph with the x-axis of delightfulness and the y-axis of functionality. Find the intersection, and you’ve got everything Andrew has ever built. Riding his handcrafted electric bike feels like some form of divination. There are three settings, each indicating the degree to which the engine will assist your pedaling. The acceleration relative to the pedal speed feels intuitive. On setting 3, the engine fully assists your cycling. The minute you stop pedaling, the engine assist turns off. You still use your momentum to coast, but the design rightfully assumes that you don’t want to additionally increase speed if you’ve stopped pedaling. It’s the perfect kick to send you up a hill if you don’t want to do the work. And if you’d like to make that hill your bitch, you can hit a switch that manually turns on the engine completely.
From the looks of his garage, there are an infinite number of additional projects in the hatch. He rebuilt mid-century-modern cabinetry to include retro-style speakers. The audio cabinet has Apple AirPlay and Spotify Connect along with a built-in bar. He also made his own drivable cooler and nearly skinned his shins clean-testing the drift. The steering mechanism looks like a tiny wheel of one of those fake playground busses, and the break is a foot pedal, so you can “hold a drink in one hand at all times.” As Andrew added, “Why else would you want a drivable cooler?”
Next up: refurbishing an old Mustang. Right now the chassis is sitting in a sea of odds and ends — some plush, some not. If you see a bespoke Mustang rolling around in the next few years, look through the driver’s-side window. You’ll probably find Andrew Renz testing out his newest invention.
