Power Wheels
The battery-powered Jeep the rich kid on the block drove down the sidewalk while everyone else pedaled. Power Wheels, and above all the hot-pink Barbie Jeep, were the 90s driveway status symbol, right up to the 1998 recall of about ten million of them.
Power Wheels started as an Italian idea. Peg Perego, an Italian company founded in 1949, built battery-powered ride-ons and sold them in the United States through an arm called Pines of America. In 1984 the San Francisco toy company Kransco bought Pines and renamed the line Power Wheels; three models were on sale by 1985, and the first Jeep followed in 1986. By 1994 Power Wheels made up roughly 80 percent of Kransco's $170 million in sales, and that year Mattel bought the whole company for $254.6 million and parked the brand under Fisher-Price.
The 90s were the Power Wheels decade because the 90s were the Barbie Jeep decade. Fisher-Price's Camp Barbie Jeep and Super Talk! Barbie Beach Patrol arrived in 1995, followed by the Barbie Sun Jammer 4x4 in 1997 and Barbie Splash in 1999, all in a pink no other toy on the street could match. Alongside them ran a fleet of scaled-down real vehicles, Jeep Wranglers, Ford F-150s and Mustangs, with working doors and both forward and reverse. Owning one meant something on a cul-de-sac. So did being invited to ride in one.
The brand's low point came on October 22, 1998, when the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Fisher-Price announced a recall of up to 10 million Power Wheels vehicles sold since 1984: every two-battery model and some one-battery ones. The electrical components could overheat and catch fire. The agency had logged roughly 700 reports of electrical failure and about 150 fires, nine children with minor burns, and up to $300,000 in damage to 22 houses and garages, plus 71 reports of vehicles that would not stop. The company had already recalled its 18-volt Porsche 911 in 1991 for a pedal switch that could weld itself on. The recall did not kill the line; a Harley-Davidson motorcycle ride-on in 1999 gave Power Wheels a record sales year, and it has since sold more than a hundred model names, from Cadillac Escalades to Lightning McQueen. But the pink Jeep parked in the garage next to the real car is the image that survives.
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