Independent study · public data only

We scheduled Disney's Cars Land from the outside. Then we forecast it.

Piston Peak National Park is the Cars-themed land under construction at Magic Kingdom. We used only public announcements, permit filings and aerial photography. From that we built a 1,335-activity construction schedule, checked it against fourteen months of observed progress, and ran it through the forecasting model nPlan trained on 750,000 real project schedules. The result is a 45-page study and the schedule itself. The forecast is a projection of the plan as it stands. The study's second half is about what would change it.

Planned opening

14 Mar 2030

deterministic CPM date

Forecast P50

24 Feb 2031

if the plan runs as it stands

Forecast P80

27 Jun 2031

the date a cautious planner commits to

Chance of plan

likelihood of opening on 14 Mar 2030

Get the study and the schedule

Enter your email and we will send you both files.

The 45-page study (PDF)
The calibrated baseline schedule (Primavera P6 XER)

We will only use your address to send the files and, if you opt in, occasional nPlan updates. No involvement from, or endorsement by, The Walt Disney Company.

What we did

Seven steps, every one of them run on nPlan's production tools

Nothing in the chain was hand-drawn. Schedule Studio generated and expanded the schedule from a scope brief. A planner calibrated it. Insights forecast it. We progressed it with actuals and forecast it again. Then we stress-tested it with six scenarios.

Only what anyone can see

Disney's announcements give the scope. Water management permits give the primary-infrastructure target. Month-by-month aerials give the observed dates for demolition, the river channel, the retaining wall and fill.

A schedule a bidder would recognise

Eight phases, 104 WBS nodes, 1,335 activities and 1,678 logic links with no open ends. Six explicit weather allowances sit where Florida's wet and hurricane seasons fall on the critical path.

A forecast, not a date

5,000 simulated outcomes for every milestone, from a model trained on the outcomes of more than 750,000 real construction schedules. P10, P50, P80 and P90 dates for all fifteen milestones.

Tested against what happened

Two milestones have already been reached. Both fell inside the forecast's P10 to P90 range, and in both the P50 was closer to the outcome than the plan was.

What we found

Five findings from the study

2031

Run as it stands, the plan opens in the first half of 2031

The plan opens on 14 March 2030. Projected forward with no intervention, with progress to 30 September 2026, it gives a P50 of 24 February 2031 and a P80 of 27 June 2031. The 2029 date repeated on fan sites is very unlikely on this plan. Even the best structural scenario lands in the second half of 2030 at P50.

224 of 424 days

Half the slip arrives after the mountain is finished

On day one, before any progress, the forecast put the opening 424 days behind the plan at P50. Fourteen months of actuals cut that to 347 days, but the shape did not change. The civils add 48 days. The terrain course and rockwork mountain add 152. Ride testing, show integration and certification add 224, in 21 planned months.

20 months

In our schedule the ride chain runs far ahead of the land. That is the assumption to check.

Four packages carry the critical path with zero float. The land theming, infrastructure, family ride and guest buildings have between 430 and 1,000 working days of float. Some chain is always critical, so the finding is the size of the gap, and the gap comes from our calibration of a first-of-a-kind ride. It holds unless Disney's ride programme is about twenty months shorter than ours. If it holds, a phased opening in 2029 is the only route to that year that does not require beating the plan.

2 of 2

On the two milestones we can check, the forecast was closer than the plan

Enabling works and demolition were planned for 4 November 2025; the forecast gave a P10 to P90 of 7 November to 12 December, with a P50 of 20 November; the island was cleared around 14 November. Earthworks and civils were planned for 24 April 2026; the forecast gave 13 May to 30 July, with a P50 of 12 June; the retaining wall finished on about 17 July. The plan was ten days and twelve weeks early. The P50 was six days late and five weeks early. Two points are consistent with the model, not proof of it.

Ten checkpoints tell you whether the plan is holding

The study closes with a recovery programme of eight interventions, each with an owner, a size in weeks and the date after which it stops being worth doing, fifteen questions the public record cannot answer, and ten observable checkpoints for the next three years with P80 red lines. The nearest one is weeks away: whether the first section of the mountain climb reads as finished rock in the November 2026 aerials.

Your programme

The same machinery on the inside view

Everything here was built in a few days from the outside. With a real P6 or Microsoft Project export, the forecast, the scenarios, the slip curve and the checkpoints regenerate with every progress update. If you would like to see it on one of your programmes, get in touch.

This study was produced without any involvement from, data from, or endorsement by The Walt Disney Company, Walt Disney Imagineering or their contractors. Every input is drawn from public announcements, public permit filings and published aerial photography. Dates, durations and logic are nPlan's own estimates and should be read as an outside view, not as a representation of Disney's programme. Cars, Piston Peak and related names are trademarks of their owners and are used here only to identify the subject of the study.