As a recent addition to the city’s ever-growing selection of showstopper vehicles for sightseeing trips, Hot Rod Budapest provides probably the most unique alternative for touring town right now, as its souped-up go-karts are creating quite a stir in downtown traffic. Named after the classic American cars with modified engines, Mini Hot Rods have already been turning heads in other major metropolises, including Berlin and Vienna, and the German-made vehicles are now finally available for rent in the Hungarian capital – the We Love Budapest team recently took four of the company’s current fleet of five automobiles for a hair-raising ride around downtown.
Headquartered at an understated base on District VII’s Rumbach Sebestyén Street, a fun selection of motorized mini-vehicles stands amid ordinary cars in a gravel parking lot, offering one-of-a-kind jaunts around town to passionate drivers. Anyone who signs up for a tour first receives a brief onsite course explaining how to operate these surprisingly fast littlelowriders, before hitting the narrow lanes of the city’s historic downtown, following a guide who leads the way on a Vespa scooter. As we gain control over our automatic-transmission cars, we also feel increasingly confident about navigating in the city’s daytime traffic, even though passing vehicles now look like mammoth machines from this street-level perspective.
As we make a U-turn at buzzing Deák Square to driving towards Astoria and Ferenciek Square, we zip past waving pedestrians while groups of tourists reach for their cameras to take quick snapshots of our diminutive fleet. We start getting bolder about cruising down the city’s multi-lane roads, allowing us to slowly start immersing into the surrounding scenes, especially when we drive over Elizabeth Bridge and enjoy the scenic Danube views from a never-before-seen perspective... but we are still being vigilant enough about the bustling road traffic surrounding us.
Reaching the Buda side of the Danube, we take a curvaceous turn uphill, slightly slowing down to avoid any drifting. We continue our engine-heating climb for a nearby petrol station, where we fill our tanks for the journey ahead as we head up on the city’s scenic Citadel vantage point atop Gellért Hill. Here, after zigzagging between heaps of double-decker tour buses, we finally park our Hot Rods to climb out and admire the scenic wraparound views over the curving Danube and Pest’s cityscape, including the bridge that we crossed just minutes before. When we get back to our cars in a few minutes, we find our Hot Rods have suddenly become a bigger sensation than the panoramic lookout point, as animated groups of tourists surround our vehicles to pose for photos.
After our guide helps us manually turn our vehicles around amid the anthill of staring sightseers, we start descending the hillside, steering towards Buda’s Danube bank. The traffic along this waterfront road is less heavy, allowing us to soak in the riverside panorama with the passing boats and Pest’s urban cityscape in the background. We are still on the Buda side of town, where we make another photo stop in front of the stately Várkert Bazaar under Castle Hill, and after refreshing ourselves with a bottle of ice-cold water and taking a few group pictures we restart our engines and continue our excursion to cross the Chain Bridge on our way back to Pest.
Budapest’s iconic span is always buzzing with life, and during our ride we again incite excitement among tourists amused by our unofficial procession unfolding right in front of their eyes. However, not everybody gives us the thumbs up. We see a bus driver shaking his head in disapproval – he might consider this fresh phenomenon as yet another obstacle on Budapest’s highly frequented lanes, but in fact, our powerful little vehicles can easily navigate even the most congested settings.
For the last leg of our journey, we cruise down Andrássy Road, where we can finally gun the engine along a short stretch. While the tour normally covers the entire length of this august avenue all the way to Heroes’ Square, now we turn right at Oktogon to return to the Jewish Quarter, where our adventure started. We drive our Mini Hot Rods into the company’s base, and when we get out of the car we feel somewhat disoriented after the bustling ride – even though speed control and traffic didn’t allow us to test the car’s 100 kilometer-per-hour top speed, we could enjoy some serious spurts of acceleration provided by the 16-horsepower engine along a few city sections.
Mini Hot Rod tours start at 5am (also called the sunrise tour, which is highly recommended for early risers who want to avoid city traffic), at 10am, at noon, and later at 7pm and at 9pm, with the last trip departing at 11pm on weekdays; tours run throughout the day during the weekend. Registration is available for anyone with a valid “B” category driving license, and participants also have to pass a breath-based alcohol test before hopping into one of the cars. A 90-minute downtown tour costs 27,000 forints per person, and while this is not the most pocket-friendly sightseeing alternative in Budapest, anyone who signs up for a ride will surely cherish (and make passersby be part of) a memorable experience. Meanwhile, get ready for your picture driving the car becoming part of multiple photo albums around the world.
Mini Hot Rod Factory
Address: Budapest 1075, Rumbach Sebestyén utca 8 WebsiteFacebook page
