The best road playmats for toy cars

This road playmat from The Rug House covers all bases. The road layout is excellent and varied, and the print quality is great. While it has carpet texture, the mat is an unspecified polyamide, but most likely nylon, so you can just wipe it down for cleaning.

Of course, we like the double-sided nature of this mat too, with a rural setting on the flip side. And if you're thinking 80 x 150cm might be a bit small, there is a larger 100 x 165cm version too.

If it's size you desire, consider this. The layout is quite good, we particularly like the inclusion of a railway. The only thing we don't like is that a few vehicles are printed onto the roads already. The roads ought to be clear for the toy cars to drive on.

Where the mat above is more of a carpet or rug, this has a smoother finish, like a vinyl floor, thanks to a PVC film over the top. We prefer the carpet-type texture, but this acts as a great protective floor mat for general use too.

Like our Editor's Pick, this Chad Valley Double Sided Playmat is double-sided. On one side is a race track, and on the other, city streets. That's brilliant.

The downsides are that the mat isn't very big and isn't as thick as our top recommendation, but then it is significantly cheaper. So you can't be too surprised at that.

This Colours Danis City Road Playmat does very well at providing bang for buck. Granted, it doesn't have a race track on the flip side and nor is it as large as the EDUK8 Worldwide mat. But it is a nylon pile carpet like our top pick and covers a large area.

The only downside is that the scene doubles up. It repeats, which is unfortunate but not a deal breaker.

There are many Hot Wheels track kits that we like, and it's very hard to choose one, but we have, and this is it. The reason we chose it is because it covers almost every base expected of a Hot Wheels track.

It has a loop and a corkscrew and stands over 2.5 feet tall. The blue track goes uphill, boosting the car from the launcher at the bottom. It comes with non-damaging 3M adhesive pads for mounting the track to the wall.

If it's a Hot Wheels garage you're after, the Hot Wheels Super Ultimate Garage is fantastic (it'd better given it includes Super and Ultimate in the name). It's a massive multi-storey complex that has a motorised lift and can hold over 140 cars.

A handful of 1:64-scale Hot Wheels-tuned cars based on real models.

This is the best starter pack, consisting of weird and wonderful 1:64-scale Hot Wheels machines.

The more realistic sibling of Hot Wheels is of course Matchbox. This gift set contains a range of nine neat 1:64-scale models. The models in the kits vary.

We only recommend these to gentle children. They're supposed to be for collectors but some kids take care of their cars and could use these super realistic models. The cars in this pack have detailed interiors as well as exteriors. There are a few other Majorette packs like this, including a muscle car one.