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The roller coaster designed to kill you [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2025-12-11  

In 2010, a Lithuanian artist named Julijonas Urbonas designed the ultimate thrill ride: a steel roller coaster engineered specifically to kill everyone who rides it. He called it the Euthanasia Coaster.

Urbonas, a former amusement park employee and PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London, took inspiration from John Allen, the former president of the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, who once mused that the "ultimate" roller coaster would be one that "sends out 24 people and they all come back dead."

According to Wikipedia, the design begins with a 500-meter lift hill (for comparison, the world's tallest coaster, Kingda Ka, is 139 meters). The slow climb gives passengers time to contemplate their lives and, if they choose, exit the train. Those who remain must press a button to continue, at which point they plunge down a 500-meter drop reaching 360 km/h before entering seven consecutive loops. Each loop gets smaller to maintain a lethal 10 g-force for a full 60 seconds, starving the brain of oxygen until passengers black out and die.

Urbonas describes the goal as taking lives "with elegance and euphoria."

Previously:

• The best roller coaster you've (likely) never ridden

• Models of Worlds of Fun roller coasters, circa 1980

• Toddler has his very own backyard roller coaster

• This fellow reached the highest intensity level possible on Roller Coaster Tycoon 2

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/12/11/the-roller-coaster-designed-to-kill-you.html

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