What ELEMARA makes, and who it is for

Battery-powered ride-on cars, quads, tractors, dirt bikes, go-karts and bumper cars for children, plus the outdoor gear that follows them around: wiggle cars, ride-on trains, kick scooters, stroller wagons, inflatable water slides and bounce houses, and a small shelf of bedside bassinets and playards. Eight shelves in all. What holds them together is not a category but an afternoon: every one of these ends up on a driveway, a lawn or a path, with an adult somewhere in sight.

Three things you can check on the box. A parent remote on 2.4 GHz that overrides the pedal at any moment, on twelve of the machines here. Moulded EVA tyres instead of hard plastic, which grip a wet driveway and leave no black line on a garage floor. And a sealed lead-acid pack on a standard connector, so three years in you replace a battery rather than the machine.

The trade is weight and charging time. These are heavier to carry than the plastic cars they replace, and a flat pack takes eight to twelve hours to fill.

Roughly three to eight on the twelve-volt machines and six to fourteen on the twenty-four-volt ones, but the age on a box is the least useful number in this catalogue. Seat width, the reach from the seat back to the pedal, and the rider weight limit decide whether a child fits, and a tall four-year-old runs out of first car long before the birthday says so.

Yes, and two shelves of it. The wiggle car runs on nothing but the steering wheel, converting a side-to-side turn into forward motion through angled castors. The stroller wagons and the inflatable water slides have no drive at all: one is pulled by an adult, the other by gravity and a garden hose.

Since 2010, which is 16 years of the same problem: a child who wants to drive and an adult who wants to be able to stop them. The useful part of that is not the anniversary but its consequence: the connectors, the chargers and the pack sizes have stayed compatible, so a spare battery is still a spare battery and a machine bought years ago can still be brought back with a part rather than replaced.