11 Of The Most High-Tech Roller Coasters Ever Built (And Where To Find Them)

The world of roller coasters is an exciting one. The towering steel (or sometimes wooden) tracks stand like giant beacons within their respective theme parks. They beckon for adventurous riders to step up and be transported away to a distant universe, if for just the few minutes it takes to ride the coaster's length. It's perhaps this portal to another world that makes games like Rollercoaster Tycoon so popular (or launches LEGO-compatible rollercoaster building kits)! Roller coasters come in a wide range of styles, from the incredible speeds of launch rides to hanging tracks that suspend riders beneath the rail.

However, many of the huge thrills and terrifying turnovers found in the world of roller coaster design isn't all that technical or cutting edge. For the hardened fans, only the most exciting twists and turns, coupled with novel design elements and innovative track features will do. Whether on American soil or far flung across the world, these roller coasters showcase the best of coaster design language. Some tracks feature integrated settings that elevate the ride's experience while others double down on shock factor with unique cart dynamics or technological and engineering prowess that delivers immense speed or height that was previously thought impossible.

The first of two entrants located in Busch Gardens' Tampa location, Cobra's Curse is a decent starting point for a list of technically sophisticated roller coasters. Busch Gardens runs a roller coaster-dense operation, with numerous high thrill rides littered throughout the park (SheiKra, Montu, and now Iron Gwazi, for instance). But Cobra's Curse occupies a different space — it isn't a major thriller, but it provides a crucial entry point for younger riders hoping to experience their own excitement while the big kids tame the steel giants standing tall around the grounds.

The coaster offers a 70-foot track elevation and a top speed of 40 mph. It's nothing to get wildly excited about for a hardened rider, but for younger enthusiasts just dipping their toes into the wide world of roller coaster magic, it could be the perfect start. Add to that the fact that the cars become untethered to the track's forward momentum, and the experience becomes unique and perhaps even inspiring. The cars start in a forward position, but quickly shift in their orientation to face the rear before eventually finding themselves allowed to swing around on their axis freely as the train makes its way along the curvature of the ride.

Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure is spectacular and, indeed, perhaps magical. The ride cost $300 million to construct — triple what the previous most expensive rollercoaster cost — and with its Linear Synchronous Motor (LSM) launch mechanism, it is a coaster of the future. The propulsion requires no moving parts, and instead launches cars using an electromagnetic system (similar to modern hovertrain technology). The technology has been employed since its first instance at Six Flags Magic Mountain in 1997, but never before has it been featured so extensively in a coaster. The track utilizes four LSM boosts and three individual launches, combining to set a record for launching features of any sort, let alone high-tech electromagnetic propulsion. The track carries riders over more than 5,000 feet of linear distance with a top speed reaching 50 mph and a height of 65 feet. Through the track, riders will experience a range of integrated theme elements and experience numerous launches that bring the cars quickly up to speed. The coaster even stalls out and on a vertical rollback element and hits a few airtime hills.

Universal calls the ride the world's first "story coaster," with Hagrid's voice featuring prominently throughout the experience. Each boost, brake, and sharp turn is accompanied by something happening within the world built by the roller coaster's infrastructure. It's a truly unique experience, even if the vertical dimensions don't illicit major heart pounding excitement.

[Featured image by Elisfkc via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0]

Six Flags may be getting into VR rollercoasters, but its very-real Kingda Ka is the world's tallest coaster. Classed as a launched strata coaster, even the sight of this behemoth structure evokes a sense of dread. The rapid launch powers riders from a dead stop to 128 mph, making it the fastest coaster in the world when it opened, as well (it has since been surpassed). The drop angle is a full 90 degrees, making the return to Earth a nerve-shattering straight descent — and it achieves a full 5 Gs when calculating G-Force, too. Riders also tend to wait with bated breath for its retractable magnetic breaks to be called into play. On occasion the car won't reach its turnover point and instead create a rollback. This engages the breaks so that the car won't come careening into the loading platform. Even so, the car is returned to the station so that it can be launched again, a real treat for riders lucky enough to experience it.

The coaster features a hydraulic launch mechanism and reaches its top speed in just 3.5 seconds. It's a good thing that the acceleration is so rapid, too, since the pinnacle of the roller coaster is a mind bending 456 feet up (before turning over the hill and falling 418 feet back down). In 2013, Kingda Ka was temporarily closed to create additional support structures in pursuit of an attached drop tower (Zumanjaro: Drop of Doom, which rises up 415 feet). As such, the roller coaster provides stability to two towering thrill rides, not just one.

Valkyria is located in the Liseberg theme park in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was completed in August 2018, making it a fairly new entrant to the world of thrill rides. As a young buck among a list of solid contenders, it naturally features quite a few technically difficult maneuvers and interesting elements. An Immelmann loop is one of the standout twists — creating a half loop that reverses course through a 180-degree turn, exiting the loop back the way it entered, as a result. There's also a heartline roll and zero-G roll, creating plenty of heart pounding action for riders. The coaster's top speed is 65 mph, and it has a 164-foot vertical drop (at a 90-degree drop angle). In fact, Valkyria is Europe's longest dove coaster, as well as its tallest, and features a track length of roughly half a mile, including an underground tunnel element.

The roller coaster's coursing trail extends over a minute and a half ride, starting with an immediate lift as the Viking-themed doors open to reveal the coaster's ascent. And before the precipitous drop into a fog-encased pit, the cars are halted for a brief, yet, intense couple of seconds right at the top of the track's precarious edge. This sweetens the pot and really gets the blood flowing when the coaster finally launches into full gear.

This one feels out of place in a Disney park. Located in Orlando's Hollywood Studios (a part of Florida's sprawling Disney World set of theme parks), Rock 'n' Roller Coaster has been a mainstay of the theme park's more exciting offerings since it opened in 1999. Found near the Tower of Terror, the coaster is a major draw for anyone seeking speed and intense G-forces. Rock 'n' Roller Coaster produces 5 Gs, placing it among the most elite power performers in any class of coaster.

Located entirely inside, the coaster rattles through a darkened environment while blaring Aerosmith tunes — every ride experiences a different shuffle of hits, making each experience unique. The coaster features an LSM launch mechanism, doing away with the moving parts of earlier technology. It achieves a rapid speed boost from zero to 57 mph in just 2.8 seconds and showcases three inversions. The coaster's thematic stylings make it what it is, to be sure, but the ride's chops aren't bad either. As a launcher, it achieve serious velocity in seemingly no time at all, and offers a drop of 78 feet. Totally in the darkened space of the hectic "limo ride to an Aerosmith show" that the coaster presents, it's a seriously effective thriller with a big dose of technical heroics.

X2 is the rebranded and totally buffed up reimagining of the original X roller coaster found in Los Angeles' Six Flags Magic Mountain. X opened its gates in January 2002, and was transformed into X2 in 2008 when new cars were installed to substantially alter the experience for riders. Today, Six Flags calls it a "fifth dimension roller coaster," featuring swiveling seats and head first tumbles. "On ordinary roller coasters, the train stays in line with the track... but there is nothing ordinary about X2," the park warns. The trains are oriented with seats along its wings, and the cars begin to swivel around the train's frame as the roller coaster takes flight. The dynamic produces a completely unique experience for most riders.

The track is quite spectacular, too. The coaster introduces fire elements to produce a heightened "sensory overload" for riders, while a variety of looping elements, twists, and a pair of Raven Turns (an element that's not often deployed in coaster design, deployed in just two other coasters globally). They present themselves as half loops that see the bottom drop out midway through the maneuver. A 215-foot drop and 76 mph top speed make for a truly exciting ride which has been supercharged by the technical aspects of the track's design and spinning wing-mounted cars.

Voltron Nevera is a brand new installation at Germany's Europa-Park in Rust. The track was opened to riders in April 2024 and it immediately turned heads. The cars are semi-floorless, and the coaster's track features numerous launch elements and seven total inversions, generating quite a sensational amount of buzz. The coaster is themed around Nikola Tesla's work with electricity, and riders will be treated to a Tesla "experiment" in which people (rather than electricity) are transported between two replicas of the inventor's original Wardenclyffe Tower.

Riders will experience four individual launch elements and a 2.2 second span of weightlessness while hurtling along the track. The ride can pull a full 4 Gs while reaching a maximum speed of 62.1 miles per hour. The track's peak sits at 106.6 feet in the air. Its height and other basic characteristics don't stand out particularly, but the sheer volume of integrated, gut-turning elements spread across the three minute ride — including an Immelmann loop, zero-G stall, and numerous corkscrews — is impressive to say the least.

[Featured image by Europa-Park PR via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]

A unique wooden roller coaster, T-Express is found in South Korea's Everland theme park, just south of Seoul. However, this isn't your average woodie (its a real term for wooden rollercoasters, we swear). The design and manufacturing team created a prefabricated track layout that was laser cut rather than being shaped and truly "created" on site. Intamin was responsible for manufacturing these precision components — a classic name in roller coaster construction, responsible for the building of Kingda Ka and Abu Dhabi Ferrari World's Formula Rossa, the world's fastest rollercoaster, among other famous examples.

T-Express was developed with a bonded wood frame that made building the finished product faster and simpler than a traditional wooden coaster. The resulting ride experience is also much smoother than might be expected. The ride is an entertaining thrill, but at about 65 mph for a top speed and a 150 foot drop, the specs won't blow any hardcore riders away. The Everland park itself calls the 77 degree drop "giddy," not exactly instilling fear in the hearts of its riders! No matter, the roller coaster features high speed turning elements and numerous airtime hills to create the excitement that riders will be seeking. Add to this the technologically advanced fabrication techniques and you've got yourself one special coaster.

[Featured image by Roller Coaster Philosophy, Jeremy Thompson via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY 2.0]

Iron Gwazi is an interesting inclusion. The track sits in the same location as a previous coaster with a similar name. Gwazi was a wooden roller coaster built in Tampa's Busch Gardens in 1999. I personally had the great fortune to ride both Gwazi's "dueling tracks" just after it opened as a kid living in the area. It didn't offer much in the way of excitement, and quickly became known as a headache-inducer and a coaster to avoid. The coaster was a sort of novelty in the park, though, being a wooden track, and it finally closed for good in early 2015.

In 2018 it was announced a replacement would be coming to the site, bringing the world's fastest and steepest hybrid steel/timber coaster to life (as well as North America's tallest in that coaster class). Due to pandemic delays, riders weren't able to experience the dramatic 206-foot drop down a thundering 91-degree slope or the 76 mph top speed until March 2022. Iron Gwazi is a drastic departure from its predecessor. The new coaster uses around 40% of the original structure, but its lift hill surges upward at a ludicrous angle, reaching around double the height. The track features the tallest "beyond vertical" return to Earth in the world. Both its construction — utilizing the guts of its predecessor — and the resulting coaster itself are marvels of engineering and design.

[Featured image by Adog via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]

This Bolliger & Mabillard menace is classed as a hyper coaster, and for good reason. It opened in May 2012 and represents the first B&M coaster to crack the 300-foot height mark. It's Canada's tallest and fastest roller coaster — even more than a decade after it first launched — reaching a peak height of 306 feet and a speed that tops out at 92 mph. The coaster is intense, to say the least. The track spans just over a mile in total length (with a roughly 3.5 minute runtime) and riders can expect to feel a G-Force measured as high as 4.5, above the threshold deemed safe as a sustained experience (though not much compared to the 9 Gs that F-35 pilots often experience!). In fact, the measured G-Force of the coaster places it tied for ninth highest of any roller coaster ever built.

The track is daunting for a first-time rider. It features eight precipitous drops, with the primary hill offering a drop that measures out at the same 306-foot height as the track's upper reach itself. The cars plummet back down to the ground at an 80-degree angle, adding severe steepness to the thrill, as well. While there are no inversions in the circuit, there are two nearly vertical sections of the track that bring riders back up to fairly noteworthy heights to experience yet another drop at rapid speed.

[Featured image by Tim Hill2 via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY 2.0]

Sheer distance features as the technological marvel of this roller coaster. Steel Dragon 2000 was unveiled in August 2000, ushering in the new millennium as the world's longest roller coaster. The track was once owner of the tallest and fastest records as well, but more than 20 years later, only the distance record remains unbroken. The 8,133.2-foot coaster takes riders over a four minute adventure. The first lift brings riders up a hill towering above the Japanese countryside below (from 318.2 feet) before plummeting nearly that entire distance back to Earth (along a 308.6-foot drop). The camelback design rockets riders back up to a second 252-foot hill before again returning them to ground level. There are six additional camelback rises along the route, and multiple helix elements that round out the ride.

Not only is the lift hill immensely tall, the speed gained from the two-chain lift is magnificent; indeed the hill is so long that the lifting mechanisms deploy two separate chains that take turns bringing riders up to its pinnacle in a lower and upper orientation. 95 mph is the coaster's top speed, and the giga-coaster is bolstered by additional support systems designed to help it maintain its stability in the event of an earthquake in the area — an issue that routinely affects the island of Japan.