These are the best vehicles in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

It isn’t the first place you’d look if you were in the mood for designing your own avant-garde cars, but Nintendo’s latest entry in the storied Legend of Zelda series has some powerful tools. Tools that let you cobble together vehicles from raw materials in the world around you. Like a voyeur of fantasy land MacGuyvers, we’ve been following YouTube creators intently in search of their finest inventions. 

Are they the prettiest automotive creations you’ve ever seen? No. The fastest? No. But will they get you to your destination? No, probably not that either. But look, let’s just give it a go for the sake of novelty. Here are six vehicles you should have a go at constructing. 

This cheap and simple off-roader from Austin John Plays will saunter over lumpy terrain and bounce over waist-high fences with a confidence that’d make a Land Cruiser blush. To build it you only need one 2x4 wooden board, four large wheels and a control unit, which is about as simple as it gets. 

You can go bigger and hardier with a stone 4x8 base if that’s your thing. Personally, we're already getting Tom Hanks’ raft from Castaway vibes from this thing, so we can’t imagine making the base even more vast would alleviate that. 

During normal operation, this is merely a buggy with a nice low centre of gravity and some decent speed. Flip a switch though, and the helicopter blades come out. We’ve googled it, and helicopters are definitely faster than cars. Handy for clearing obstacles, too. 

If there are any downsides to this ingenious design from redditor U/BeZide314, found via ZeldaWTF, it’s that it gives hard-to-quantify but incontrovertible bad guy vibes. Let’s face it, if you see this monstrous thing emerge on the horizon, all green lightning bolts and whirring blades, you’re not thinking “Ah, I’m saved.”

Dangerous, reactionary figures in cinema are now starting to claim that Star Wars: Episode I may not be the greatest movie of all time, as was once thought. Those dissidents have clearly forgotten that pod racing bit where the little boy drives a giant coat hanger.

A creator called Meatswipe on zeldabuilds.gg (found via IGN) has found a way to bring that iconic piece of cinema to Hyrule. It’s a multi-engine array that’s capable of some impressive speeds, but it turns out putting two massive jets at the end of a spindly tube doesn’t make for the easiest drive. What it lacks in manoeuvrability it compensates for amply in cool points. 

There’s a ruthlessness about Bob Gucci’s incredibly rapid build. Not an ounce of fat on it, anywhere, to the extent that you couldn’t really call it a car. Nor anything else, specifically. It’s like an abstract notion of speed made form. A big wheel flanked by slightly smaller wheels that you somehow stand on and absolutely razz about Hyrule with. Top marks. 

It’s not the easiest to build however, and requires quite a few different parts and resources. Fortunately this formidable vehicle’s inventor has made a comprehensive tutorial video to help you recreate it. 

This one’s a canny variation on the popular glider build that many players use - basically just two fans and a steering stick, all placed in a row. And the glider definitely gets you there, but with the difficulty it has in landing safely or steering, you’re never going to walk away and give it a 5-star Uber rating.

It’s a pretty simple recalibration that 2uncle2dane has devised here: just arrange those parts so that they’re all facing forward, and you’re controlling them from the mid-point. That makes an air bike which you can descend with easily and cut sick lines while you’re airborne for nearby Bokoblins to admire. 

We’ll be honest, this build has little to no practical value. It’s a house with a face. It’s extremely difficult to control, it’s slow, and based on the video of ZAKUYA_BOTW’s creation featured on Top Gaming Plays, it catches fire more easily than a tracksuit from down the market soaked in paraffin. 

But when you’re putting together a list of the best vehicles in the game, you can’t watch a video of a flying house-face catch fire and then fail to feature it. Our hands were tied.