Diecast &c vs. Despondency, Despair

A particularly fine casting returned to view lately: the LB-WORKS Lamborghini Huracán Coupe.

The Huracán is one of Lamborghini's best cars of the recent era, a V10 coupe and spider, phenomenally good looking and well engineered to boot.  Despite the killer engine, shared with the Audi R8, it is the smaller of the two Lamborghini sports car models sold in its only recently ended lifetime, lacking the V12 of the Aventador, and popular too, produced in quantities higher than any other Lamborghini (if you ignore the Urus, and why wouldn't you?).  It took the Aventador's intersecting polygon design language stemming from stealth planes and married it to an updated Gallardo chassis, and did it in a way that looks a lot better than both the car it replaced and the car that was made to replace it, the Temerario, too.

Lamborghinis inspiring the cult following that they do, perhaps it's inevitable that the Huracán would receive the attentions of Wataru Kato.  Kato's firm Liberty Walk, often abbreviated (in the nearly-logical-but-not-quite-right style common to English used in Japanese) as LBWK or just LB, has a distinctive style of bodykit involving widened bolt-on arches, extreme aero parts and borrowed styling elements of other cars, many  kits being influenced by the extravagant GT cars and silhouette racers of 1970s Japanese motorsport, but applied most often to cars of the 90s and later.  Liberty Walk has a stratified system of body kits.  LB Nation kits are relatively simple add-ons or replacements for existing bodywork, made for less exotic cars, while LB Performance is a line of add-on aero for supercars, and LB Works is the top of the  line.  But if you install an LB Works kit, you'll be sawing into your bodywork; there's no going back.  This Huracán is an LB Works car.

This casting first appeared in 2021, in which form it nearly replicates a real car owned by professional drifter Mad Mike Whiddett.  The grey recolour of Gulf War 1 US 'chocolate chip' desert camo is accurately reproduced, as are the mismatched wheels.  What is not reproduced is the Red Bull sponsorship, because energy drinks are bad, apparently, and toys aren't allowed to represent them.  The rainbow shade band is my addition, the greyness needed colour and I had just got my set of Posca paint pens. 

Next there was this white one, which is not to my knowledge based on a real car but highly plausible as one; the diagonal stripes are pretty typical of Liberty Walk.  It was rather plain so I gave it a black bonnet and a blue and pink shade band and also switched the black wheels for these blue chrome rimmed ones.  This one had a store exclusive neon green second colour which, of course, we here in the People's Republic of Rest-Of-World are not permitted to have. After that, it skipped 2023 entirely and appeared as a premium in 2024's Slide Street 2, nearly the same as the debut, except worse.  Hot Wheels were experimenting with their 'inkjet' all-over-printing process, resulting in a run of grainy and pretty piss-poor premiums where they tested the water on this tech. They were also on an infuriating run of redoing mainlines as premiums nearly identically; even if I didn't already have the mainline, I wasn't going to be getting that one.  And most recently, this black one.

I knew as soon as I saw pictures of this that not only was I getting it, but that it was going to get the acetone treatment.  I am not a fan of the silly spiky stripes seen on all the Huracán Sterrato releases to date, and here they are on the Huracán LBWK as well.  And you can't all be #63.  Maybe I should acetone the stripes off that too.

I mentioned that I have my issues with Lamborghini in the Ferrari post, and it's time to air my grievance.  So, between Ferrari and Lamborghini, I mostly prefer the bulls to the horses.  The outrageous designs are more evocative and affecting than Ferrari's rather reserved, albeit often beautiful style, they just connect emotionally and aesthetically with a reliably higher hit rate than Ferrari, for me, especially after 1990. The Miura and then the Countach are to me the two most influential fast road cars of the post-war era, twice entirely redefining what a fast road car could even be.  The Countach in particular not only stunned everyone by how different from the Miura and also in-your-face radical it was in 1974, it then substantially reinvented itself for the 1978 LP400 S, ending up even better looking, a poster child for the coming decade, and the reinvention in that facelift was the third shock.

The problem started with Horacio Pagani.  Yes, that Pagani.  The reason the Zonda and its siblings can all be fully carbon is that his firm pioneered carbon fibre forming for Lamborghini before he decided to focus on his own brand of especially Frutiger Aero carbon fibre supercars.  But during Lamborghini's financial troubles of the late 80s (pretty telling that you have to specify which particular financial troubles) when a Countach replacement was suggested but ruled too expensive, what he did first was design another Countach facelift for the 25th anniversary model (on the right above).  A second facelift, which completely abandons the originality Lamborghini are known for in favour of gluing on Testarossa-inspired longitudinal strakes on half the vents - and despite how bad it looks, it sold really well.  By selling well, it taught Lamborghini all the wrong lessons.

So when it finally got urgent for the company to replace the Countach, they didn't, really.  Maybe it was down to the ownership by Swiss financiers or the sale to Chrysler, but although the Diablo was a good new car, it was nothing like the complete, shocking step change that the Miura to Countach progression had been.  It was fundamentally an iteration on the Countach, even retaining recognisable design details.  And ever since, every new Lamborghini car is a shock and a thrill, but their new ideas consist of styling and details.  The basic idea remains the same as the Countach: a longitudinal rear-mid mounted V12 wedge with snazzy doors and strikingly high-tech looks.  The Diablo, the Murcielago, the Aventador, the Revuelto, plus all the limited specials based on them, are all, underneath, basically Countach iterations with renewed styling and the odd new bit of tech; they used the same basic V12 from their very first car, the 1963 350 GT, all the way through to the end of the Murcielago in 2010.  The Huracán, too, and the Temerario, are iterations of the Gallardo, which itself was an offshoot of the Murcielago.  Rather than being fully its own thing, for all I appreciate it, the Huracán is at root a junior Countach iteration.  Lamborghini, the most futuristic of all sports car makers, is also wallowing in nostalgia, unable to conceive of a future that isn't simply the past with shinier clothes.

The Hot Wheels collecting world continues to be mildly bananas over Ferrari, but I've been shocked to find two Ferraris, red ones, even, in the wild during the past month.  Here's the aggravatingly-named 2024 Ferrari "12Cilindri" berlinetta.

This is an infuriating name to me because Ferrari insist that this is not called the 'twelve cylindree', as you might expect from reading the above.  It's to be read in Italian, you see; if you were cultured and refined like a good mark Ferrari buyer, you wouldn't need to be corrected.  What do you mean, 'how do you say it'?  Obviously, it's "Do-DEE-chee Chi-LIN-dree";  non parli nemmento Italiano?  And of course Ferrari know this, and of course it was a trap all along, and of course much of the Anglophone world sees "dodici cilindri" and nopes the hell out of making the effort to pronounce it.  It's a name designed specifically for Ferrari otaku to [repositions glasses] uhm, akchuerly about and feel like they belong for knowing how to say it; it's a Ferrari psyop.

The car itself is interesting, but not particularly good looking, at least in my estimation. It's futuristic in style, but retro in form, trying to do too much at the same time, and doesn't make much sense overall as a result; it looks confused and compromised and the styling just comes across as weird in the end. Many fuss over the nose, but I particularly don't go for the back, either on the real thing or on the HW version, where the whole rear bumper is made from the interior piece.  The design language could work if the car wasn't tied to a much older silhouette.  Looks aside, it is a hell of a car, though; that V12 gives it shove to break 210 mph and hit 60mph in under 3 seconds, all with relative ease, and it succeeds the 812 as the largest GT car Ferrari makes, one notch down from the top of the production car pile, currently the F80.  Still, the car doesn't quite sit right with me, for reasons beyond its muddled styling which I'll get to by and by.

But before I go too far into that, I'll bring the other of the new Ferraris into the converstion.  Or rather, when is a Ferrari not a Ferrari?  When it's a Dino.

Enzo Ferrari's son Alfredo had Duchenne muscular dystrophy and died aged 25, which scarred Enzo for the rest of his life.  Alfredo, known as Alfredino, or just 'Dino', completed a mechanical engineering degree and is credited with design work on several of Ferrari's racing models, particularly including the 1.5L V6 engine of the 156 Formula 2 car.  After he died in 1956, Enzo decided to honour him by creating a second marque in his name that would make cars based on his work.  Initially they stuck to racers, but after the Lamborghini Miura, the first mid-engined road car, launched to resounding success, Ferrari developed a prototype mid-engined road car in response, originally concieved as a V8.  Enzo was wary of letting the public drive a mid-engined car, with the unfamiliar balance and handling they possess, and decided that putting a less powerful engine into the production version would be safer.  The Dino V6, now a 2 litre, was perfect for the job, so the resulting car was sold as a Dino.  That initial version was this Dino 206 GT.

This reveals how many Ferrari model numbers work; for the non-V12 models, the first two numbers are the engine displacement, the third the number of cylinders.  But the larger point here is that we can see two opposing ends of the overall Ferrari story here: the ancestor of all mid-engined roadgoing Ferraris in the Dino 206 GT, and the scion of the front-engine V12 bloodline in the Dodici Cilindri.  Their lineages can be seen on their bodies.

The Dodici Cilindri is styled with a prominent black glass nose which Ferrari refuse to let you option out, a styling touch that very directly refers to a similar feature on the 365GTB/4, also known as the Daytona - the original one, not to be confused with the recent, nasty SP3 Daytona.  The overall silhouette is also sculpted to recall that car's famously flowing yet sharp lines, which are themselves a 1970s update of the daddy of all the front engined Ferrari sports racers, the 250 GTO.

Meanwhile, if you study the Dino 206 you can see the form of what became the 308 GTB and 308 GTS (themselves developments of the other production model of Dino, the Dino 308 GT4), and on down the branches of the model list, arriving eventually at the current 296 GTB and GTS, which are Ferrari's first V6 mid-engined car since the original Dino.  To me, the 296 most evokes the 250 LM in its looks, but the name is a nexus.  It's not the first car to have that model number, it having been used by the Dino 296 S, a sports racer, while the GTB/GTS designations anchor it in the 308's family too.  And I bet there will be a 296 in the Hot Wheels line soon.

The tangled web of interrelatedness is key to my problem with the Dodici Cilindri, though.  I've been feeling for a while that Ferrari and Lamborghini and in fact most sports car makers have rather lost their way.  I'll get to the specifics of Lamborghini in due course, but Porsche, Jaguar (now), all the major American brands, they are broadly speaking doing essentially the same as Ferrari, the same as what a lot of stressed older people are nowadays doing rather too much: wallowing in nostalgia.

Their design language is becoming downright futuristic, in line with the rapid sea change in the entire car industry, but the application of that design philosophy to actual form is pretty uniformly backward-looking.  Major brands, in cars but also in media, in tech, in a lot of industries are under a lot of pressure, what with, well, [gestures vagely at everything], and in response instead of innovating they are replaying the hits one more time, and frankly it's getting boring.  The majority of younger people are not interested in cars for a variety of pretty valid reasons, one of which is that the so-called 'desirable' sports cars are all appealing to someone else's desire, namely the conservative tastes of the only people who can afford them, and doing so by referring to the past instead of envisioning the future like they were when those nostalgic greats were new.  Even for old fogeys like me, nostalgia for the past is partly founded in the feeling of newness and reaching for the future so prominently found in the aesthetics of the past.  That feeling is severely adulterated where it is found today, if it can be found at all.  Nearly nothing from major marques reaches for the future or feels new.

Finally, an intensely nostalgic acquisition, yet one I have never previously owned.  I have only one other Track Fleet release, the Scania P-series rally truck, but as a rigid lorry that's pretty untypical of the series as a whole. This is the first articulated lorry from the series that I've got: Optimus Prime.

Optimus Prime was also released in cab-only form in the main line last year, but even though I was previously a huge Transformers fan (at least up to 2007, when Transformers was brutally murdered by Michael Bay), I skipped it.  Truth be told, I never had an Optimus Prime toy as a kid.  I wanted one for a while, but once I visited a friend who had one and was pretty unimpressed by it, in particular the irrelevance of his trailer.  I was always suspicious of what was supposed to happen to the trailer when he transformed, in the cartoon it always seemed to disappear out of shot.  I went for Ultra Magnus instead, which was built on a white version of the basic Optimus Prime toy, but given a car transporter trailer that combined with the cab to make a much better robot mode.

Still, Optimus Prime in original (G1, as the TF nerds say) form needs a trailer, so I was holding out for this version. It's a bit of a letdown that the trailer doesn't open and can't carry a standard sized main line car the way the majority of this series can, but not altogether that shocking. I do detect a slightly unsavoury whiff of "why try harder?" around this collab - there was no way this wasn't going to be a hit whatever they did, and the base is metal, meaning they could in theory retool to add that feature somewhere down the line.

In terms of what Optimus Prime actually is, the consensus seems to be that he's based on a Freightliner cabover, but a pastiche of one rather than a specific model.  Some say he's a WFT8664T, others a an FLT of some kind, and there's a lot of people claiming he's an 'FL86', even though the FL series wasn't cabover and while there was an FL80, there was no FL86.  My interpretation is that he's most like an FLT - that's what's in my spreadsheet, at least (the HW wiki says FLT-9664-T, but the wiki is demonstrably edited by people who just add whatever they like, so is not to be trusted).  The FLT was built between 1976 and 1986, which fits with the origin of the toy, in the 1983 Diaclone line by Takara.  I can't quite tell if the trailer is meant to be detachable, but I can't think why I would want to detach it, so that's a moot point.

February saw the release of the Ridge Raider II, a chunky and exciting-looking rally truck/SUV thing which I've since realised is very similar to an Extreme E or Extreme H spec-racing vehicle as built by Spark Racing Technology, who are also the constructors for Formula E.  As discussed, it shares a livery with a 2008 release of the original Ridge Raider, and now I finally have one of those to compare.

The first takeaway for me here is how different in shape they are while remaining similar in layout and purpose.  The RR1 is a desert racing vehicle, a classic example of a Matchbox fantasy off roader.  According to my own fantasy casting taxonomy, I'd call it a chimera, and a very convincing one, quite typical of Matchbox from 2008ish, mixing features from numerous off-roaders into a single vehicle that looks plausible enough that you can believe it could be real.

I think I can see some Humvee or Toyota MegaCruiser, some Land Rover, maybe some Mitsubishi or G-wagen, along with elements of more obscure offroaders I am only vaguely aware of, made in Russia or India or Malaysia or somewhere like that, things that are doubtless capable but rarely make it out of their home markets.

The shared layout is clear: both RR1 and RR2 have a top opening at the back revealing a pair of spare wheels, surmounted by a large rear spoiler.  Here the difference in shape is clearest, as RR2's space is very tight, whereas RR1 has a large empty space ahead of the spares, showing that under the aero fairings it is still basically a pickup at its core.  Both have a quartet of roof lights, trio of bumper mounted lights, similar bonnet vents and bolt-on arch extensions, too. 

I'm glad to report that at last I have the final part of my Matchbox 1989 World Class series 1 set, the 1984 Mercedes-Benz 500 SEC AMG (C126). 

This rather crunchy but still hard to find car is another of the castings that Matchbox reworked to remove their opening doors for this series, and like the others this one seems to have been modified to not need an interior at the same time.  It's also the only metal-based one of series 1 to not have a body-coloured base, and to have black-painted lights rather than white (I hate black painted lights!  Couldn't tolerate that).

It's interesting to compare this to the recent Hot Wheels version of the 1989 Mercedes-Benz 560 SEC AMG, which is from the second series of this C126 model and has the big, dramatic box flares that the older version of the car lacked.  The Hot Wheels also sits lower, giving it a more racy look, and enjoys a slightly better contoured body with more lifelike proportionality, making the Matchbox seem too stubby and square by comparison.  It's a common complaint for older castings - just as with the Viper RT/10, the newer casting of the same car is more proportionate and impressive than the old castings, but the old castings were not dreadful and have detail and flair new ones lack even now, exhibit 1 being the bewitching chrome windows.  Amazing what nearly 40 years can do for casting technology, huh?

I also have this red 1-75 series version with the interior, opening doors and clear windows, which has a lower stance since it doesn't have the large World Class wheels, so it looks a touch better on that front, but more intriguingly, a side view shows a potentially revealing difference. 

The adware-infested Matchbox Wiki notes there are two versions of this, the second release; the car debuted as a 1-75 car in white in 1984, with the same tampo design, but the red one seems to have been reworked to give it squared-off corners on the rear side windows (why, I can't tell; the real car doesn't have these squared-off corners, so maybe it's not strong enough to withstand being stood on?) , which allowed me to narrow that car down to a 1986-production casting.  But although several more opening-door versions were made, all of those with the square-corner windows, the World Class version, released in 1989, still has the 1984-5 sharp-cornered windows. That suggests to me that they had the old tooling lying there gathering dust and decided to recycle it for a sealed-door version.  Later a flashing-lights version with black windows was also produced, also with sharp window corners. It makes me wonder whether the two other World Class cars with sealed doors are reworked from retired versions of dies. 

Next, a third US vehicle, much more a contemporary of the Viper, but rather different.

I have here a Chrysler Thunderbolt concept car, first shown in 1993 in a silver look pretty similar to this deco scheme.  Named and styled by Tom Gale in homage to an influential concept Chrysler of the same name shown in the late '40s, in its initial form this was intended to eventually be put into production, powered by the Viper's V10 mounted in the rear, and intended as a sort of turn-of-the-millennium Thunderbird-esque personal luxury coupe, with a state-of-the-art computer doing satnav and video games [insert clip of Lex in Jurassic Park saying "An interactive CD-ROM!!!!!" when she first gets in the Ford Explorer] .  As it evolved, when it was shown in '93 it was fully functional and was given a 4L 32-valve experimental V8.  Production never happened, of course, but there's a personal reason I bought this now obscure and largely forgotten car.

I was an English teacher in Japan for nearly 11 years.  I used a standard set of textbooks my school produced, and in one particular basic-level lesson that I always enjoyed teaching, about long numbers in the form of huge prices, a very moody 'LA sunset' photo of this car appeared in the listening exercise (priced at $200,000, I think).  I pride myself in my car recognition abilities, but this one was a challenge.

Clearly a real car, and somehow tantalisingly familiar, yet not consciously known or easily identifiable at all, it took me ages of combing through concept car images to find out what it was - but I did, in the end, and the car stuck with me ever since.  More importantly, it reawoke my childhood fascination with concept cars and exposed me again after many years to the glorious world of pure design that is the concept car, except now with adult eyes and contexts.  The Chrysler Thunderbolt is responsible, in its indirect way, for a big part of my return to car design as an interest, and for my decision to give my diecast collection a general 'design museum' theme and focus. 

So when I saw this car on a YouTube video by Joe of Ignition Diecast, I was pleased and amazed to learn a diecast of it existed, and it sparked a surprisingly short and successful hunt.  This is the debut version, from 1998, and surprisingly was the first Chrysler Hot Wheels produced.  One interesting thing about diecasts versus photos of real cars is viewing angle.  Most photos of cars are taken 'at grade', the camera within the usual range of human movement, with downward angles being unusual.  But the most common viewing angle for diecasts is diagonally downward.  For this reason the car feels very different from the one in the photo; it also includes the whole silhouette where photos such as the one in the textbook sometimes crop out the back end, so I had no idea what the back actually looked like.  Similarly to my experience with the Pininfarina Modulo, seeing the thing in 3D reveals that I don't actually like it very much.

Another American sports car icon, next: the 1963 Corvette Grand Sport coupe, from Matchbox's new 1-75 releases for 1990. 

HW put out a version of this car in white this year, which I saw in shops and was kind of unimpressed by - a nice sculpt by Larry Wood, but an unattractive livery, with little possibility of an easy fix.  It made me miss my old one, and I had to look this out for the nostalgia hit and to see how rose-tinted my hindsight is.  This particular one is from the first couple of years of production, as evidenced by the roundels on the doors; on later years' production, these were replaced by 'corvette' lettering. That looks OK, but this feels much more authentically vintage racing-style. It also has the old-style 5-arch wheels that have proper sidewalls. Man, I miss when cars had proper sidewalls to their tyres.

This is a factory racing car, built extra light, right at the start of the C2 generation.  To me the best thing about this was that Zora Arkus-Duntov, Corvette's dad, built these cars in secret, without approval from the GM brass, who had banned factory racing programs.  Arkus-Duntov's plan was to sell them to private racing teams in order to compete with the then-dominant AC/Shelby Cobras, but only completed five (two roadsters, three coupes) before someone ratted him out to the bosses and production was halted. Thing is, he had intended to somehow build 125 of them.  What I want to know is: how did he foresee this working out?  I can only think that he assumed that he'd be caught at some point, and did it anyway, and that, friends, is why Arkus-Duntov was great.  True dedication and confidence, right there.  The five cars that lived were, in fact, excellent racers and competitive against the Cobras, and today sell for millions as the historic first of the racing Corvettes.  This model resembles Chassis #003's livery for the 1964 12 Hours of Sebring, although it wore the race number 2.

An odd detail of this car is the chrome interior, which I recall being among the first I'd seen, but which appears to serve no particular purpose beyond looking flashy, with no chromed bumpers, engines or other parts visible.  The exhausts could easily have been formed from the chromed interior piece, but are not, and are part of the black plastic base.

So in the end, I find my hindsight is fairly accurately tinted.  I do have a HW Grand Sport roadster, the one from the Fast & Frumious mainline 5-pack, which I think is a glorious-looking car in plain silver; it got a set of rubber tyres and chrome wheels for looking so nice, which hopefully makes up for F&F5 dropping the car in a river. 

On to the March ebay harvest, and change of plans: each one's getting its own post.  First up, the 1992 Dodge Viper RT/10 from the Hot Wheels 2023 mainline.

I missed this one first time around due to being, as the medics say, intensely fucked up, but this new casting of the RT/10 is the beginning of Hot Wheels' attempt to redeem itself and finally do right by the Viper, an effort that continued with the blue 1996 GTS with the white stripes I liked when it released last year and the premium 2003 SRT-10 from Fast & Frumious Tokyo Drift; not a fan of that version of the car, but it's a really good casting of it.

The Viper in general is undeniably a fabulous car - its early incarnations have a shockingly bad reputation for safety and unpredictability, but it has raw personality that few cars can hope to rival, and never more so than in the form in which it first met the public, the RT/10.  In 1992 trends in car design were going a very different direction from the kind of hard angles and wedges I tend to like, and Matchbox had been sold, leading to their whole brand changing its identity, so along with puberty and all the bullshit that accompanies that, I was coming out of both the car loving and diecast collecting parts of my childhood.  But for a minute I was starting to vibe with the curviness of '90s design when I saw the Viper for the first time, and you better believe that I grabbed a Matchbox model of one, in the iconic plain red too.  It might be one of the last diecasts I got as a kid, in fact.

Cut to maybe 2020, when after months I finally found an example of Syd Mead's Sentinel 400 on sale on Mercari, in a job lot alongside a revolting metallic piss-coloured Escalade and a worn blue Hot Wheels Viper with a snazzy livery.  I got the job lot for the Sentinel and considered the Escalade the cost of doing business, but I was pleased to welcome the Viper... right up until it was in my hand.  The proportions of this thing were so far out that it was effectively worse than the Escalade - at least I could fix that with a respray, if I cared to (I didn't, it remains maybe the ugliest, most unappreciated thing in my collection).  But nothing could be done with this tragic Viper, born with dreadful defects in its very anatomy.

On paper it should work.  The livery is a bit loud, but that's OK, there are few louder-looking cars out there than Vipers. The real car had very striking three-spoke wheels, and this, a 2001 release, depicted them with pretty cool 3SPs, a style of wheels we no longer see.  Problem one, they are way too big, and problem two, this means it sits really high in just the way a v10 sports monster doesn't. Also, problem three: because of the size of the wheels, the arches are crazy big, making wheel-swapping a waste of effort (I tried) and disrupting the whole balance of the car.

Making it worse, there are many missing details and contours. The Viper is a very curvy car, but the original casting is a very squared-off, 2D feeling design, with the sides and top feeling like they were sculpted separately and barely flowing together on the tops of the doors or wings at all.  The effect of this is to make it feel very short and wide, unnaturally so when the real thing is a notably long car.  Seen alongside the new casting it is actually not that much wider, but appears to be significantly wider.  Add to this the oversized windscreen and interior, absent or incorrect panel lines all over and the complete absence of side exhaust details even though the interior is designed to be exposed at the sills where they should be.  The casting was retooled later, and some of this fixed, but even in retooled form it still looks short, fat and odd, and for some reason it's still being made - there were purple and yellow versions out only last year or so.  It's tolerable in its revamped form, but the original was a dreadful casting that frankly illustrates why on the rare occasion I encountered them I looked down my nose at HW and preferred the European brands my whole childhood.

I may have been more positive about the Matchbox at the time, but looking at the World Class one I have nowadays, which is the same casting but with nicer wheels than the original 1-75 release and better detailing, it has many of the same proportion problems that the old Hot Wheels has, just less badly.  It sits lower, too, and is less inaccurate than the Hot Wheels but is only a winner comparatively, still too short and wide. 

It was looking like an extremely thin month, with only three cars acquired, one of which was a second Kei Swap to fill out the collection and supplement the one I customised.  But the two others I got are really interesting and I have a lot of thoughts.  And then funding happened, resulting in a many-part post!

But in this first part, I want to discuss the two new models, which are in fact stunningly similar.  The new Hot Wheels custom Prius is the one I encountered first.

This is an XW60 code Toyota Prius, the 5th generation of the iconic and divisive hybrid.  The history of this rather boring-looking yet innovative car is a really interesting story in design terms; sadly I can't illustrate this story with diecasts because, for reasons that may become clear, I don't have any!

The Prius (this is pronounced 'PREE-uss', by the way, not 'PRY-uss' - like with 'Celica', British standard pron is wrong here - based on the Japanese プリウス) uses a series-parallel hybrid system, also called a power-split hybrid, where the drive wheels (the front) can be driven by either the engine or the electric motor alone or in variable proportion together, which allows for the engine to be optimised for economy without affecting performance. Later versions included an extra electric motor for the rear wheels to produce a variable 4WD version and a plug-in hybrid system to enable electric-only mode for short trips.

Next to no-one remembers the first generation NHW10 (Japan only) and NHW11 (global) Prius, it was typical of Toyota in their boring phase, just a forgettable small saloon car, and didn't sell that well - but it was arguably not meant to, just to be enough that Toyota could get going with building a hybrid system and refining and iterating on it.

The one that most people think of when you say 'Prius' is the XW20 second generation launched in 2003 with its distinctive dumpy Kamm-back, aerodynamically super efficient but also very unpretty, or the very similar XW30 from 2009.  There's a Matchbox one and a Tomica one out there, but true to character neither is very interesting. This third generation looked very similar to the second, a little more up to date but very much a major proponent of the car-as-appliance school of car design, and was stultifyingly reliable, dependable and generally adequate.  Both are also from a time when Toyota would sooner have died than make cars that stood out, so although the form is quite a departure from most cars of the time, it's my belief Toyota were actively trying to make it unattractively dull in order that it not become a status symbol on its looks, and its hybrid tech be the focus. 

I think this is one of the major reasons why the car is so hated, yet successful - on top of the politicisation of the car, it represents a basic truth: not every driver gives a damn about cars, a lot just need to get somewhere as cheaply and reliably as they can, but especially in the US they need a car even though they don't care about them.  For people who are very into a thing, having to come up against the fact that many people are totally indifferent or even hostile to and resentful of that thing is liable to feel hostile, even if it's not, and receive a hostile reaction that really isn't warranted. 

The fourth generation XW50 of 2015 was a bit of a departure, and not just because they skipped XW40, presumably for superstitious reasons.  It still clearly resembled and was based on the previous two generations, but it was a significantly more flamboyantly styled car.   In particular, stylists remixed the crease on the rear flank of the NHW10 into a more flamboyant, almost sci-fi-looking groove, resulting in a striking, almost '50s-revival finned look and zigzag rear lights that are unmistakeable at night.  I can't say I like it, it still to some extent retains the 'arse in the air' Kamm-back design that turned me off cars when it became popular in the nineties and still looks stupid to me now, but it shows something important: Toyota got it.  They knew people were turning against them because their design was so insipid and neutral, and they were earnestly trying to do better.  They even entered a rather absurd Prius racing version in Super GT racing, with factory support and a GR livery. Also, with Toyota's hybrid tech in use in many more of their cars by 2015, the Prius had lost its unique purpose and needed a new reason to exist and way to appeal to people.  There may be a Tomica version of this, but since I'm not really a fan I don't have this one either.

Come 2022's XW60, they nailed it.  The 5th gen in vanilla form is honestly stunning. It is a great-looking car, the most futuristic thing Toyota has ever put into production, and frankly it looks like an error.  It looks like someone accidentally greenlit production of a concept car, so coherently stylish is its form.  The integration of the bonnet, windscreen, roofline and rear is as perfectly contiguous and sleek as a functional car can be. A glance will tell you that this is influenced by Tesla's design language, but that they've taken everything good in Tesla design and improved on it by having experienced, proven car designers and builders produce it, rather than incompetent tech-fetishist yahoos.  It solved the purpose and appeal conundrum too, by being the bold, daring choice where the Corolla is the sensible option.  This one above is a Matchbox model, the first release from 2025, and it's a great model except the wheels are a touch too big. I would compare it to a Tesla to illustrate, but again, I don't have any (except a Cybertruck, for a laugh), because Teslas are the only cars I really actively hate and I refuse to admit them into my collection.  The car is officially named as a Prius Prime, which is the plug-in hybrid version, but externally they all look similar.

Except for the new Hot Wheels one, that is.  That's because it's a custom, and although it is a superb bit of body kit design and absolutely could be real, I don't think it is; Liberty Walk made a full widebody kit for the XW50 (and for the XW 30, but the less said about that the better) that gave the car spice Toyota would never dare to on publicly available models, and my suspicion is that this kit is partly inspired by that, and partly by the Super GT car; I wonder if we'll see race liveries on this in future releases?  There's a small 'CJS' logo low on the rear quarter that I've also seen on some HW Hondas lately, which prompted me to look it up, but it turns out that Chasing JS is a maker of aftermarket titanium parts, they don't do body kits; similarly it's not JLᛋU (designer Jimmy Liu's logo; he also owns an XW60, although it's not clear if it too has a bonkers widebody), RS*R (suspension), Advan (tyres) or Rays (wheels; this model has a nice six-spoke wheel design, the 6SP, here in blue chrome, which we so rarely see on main line cars that I thought initially it was new).  The plain white pearlescent paint is perfect for a Japanese car, since white is an overwhelmingly common colour on Japanese roads for literally every type of car, from the most mundane to the most radical, and shades and types of white paint are subtle flexes in the status-symbol contest of Japanese car ownership.

One of the most notable things about this car is that it marks a pretty major new feature for Hot Wheels: intentional body variations.  Wheel variations are pretty common for HW and minor variations in body details are not that uncommon either, across a castings whole run or in some cases within a single release e.g. the grille of the Datsun 510 Wagon is seen with a mesh or plain texture, putting two obviously distinct versions of a car out at one time is new.   Matchbox has done this for a while, producing variant plastic parts that can interchange, and in business terms it's a great idea, making variant models much more collectible.  A good example is the Matchbox Toyota MR2, which has two variant parts, meaning there are four possible versions of each MR2 release, with lights up or down as dictated by which window piece is fitted, and right or left hand drive dictated by the interior; mine above is lights-up and RHD.  Many MB pickup trucks can be found in versions with nothing in the back and alternate variations with clutter.

The Prius custom's variation is on the roof, it has a plain roof version and a version with a roof box.  The card art depicts the roof box on all cards, so I suspect the roof box version is the original design, but initially I found only the plain one.  Later I encountered the roof box version, but I decided to skip it - I'm hoping there's a second colour version this year that doesn't suck.  The idea of variations is great and the execution strong, although if I'm honest, cool though it is I am not in love with the box and I think I like the plain roof version more.  It also features an easter egg, a sleeping cat in the boot (I haven't taken this apart, however it's just about visible through the rear window under a bright light, but is not very well defined).  Great model, really happy to have it. 

My other new acquisition for March is another pearl white, futuristic new car with beautiful streamlined style. It's the Polestar 5, and it's the biggest surprise of the year so far for me. I expected it last year, in fact, but as with all Mattel diecasts, especially Matchbox, supply is inherently unreliable and I thought I'd simply missed it, until I found it again listed as a new model for 2026.

I don't see many Polestars on the road, so I didn't know anything about this when I read that it would be made by Matchbox - I put it on my list because I dig Nordic design and Volvos.  I became aware of the brand through Need for Speed Heat's cover car, a yellow Polestar 1 with a bonkers body kit by Khyzyl Saleem, but the 1s were made in such low quantity that I don't expect I'll ever see one. What Polestars I do see are usually Polestar 3s, which as essentially overweight tall iterations of family hatchbacks are at the least objectionable end of the crossover spectrum, right beneath Audi Q2s and Porsche Macans in my estimation, and my assumption was that the 5, like the 2 and the 4, would be that, but bigger.  However, it's not that at all; it's a great looking luxury full-electric saloon - a proper car, new in 2026, what an unexpected treat!  The possibly upcoming Polestar 6 is another, an angular and chunky but pretty cool four-seat sporty convertible.  I'll be on the lookout if Matchbox decide to make that, but I think I like the 5 best of all the Polestars made to date. All of them are at least acceptable, unlike the Polestar TRX that Hot Wheels put out last year. Ewww, no thank you, that one was a sad but instant skip.

Loopy widebody aside, the similarity between this and the XW60 Prius is striking.  The Polestar is longer at front and back and puts me in mind of the child of an XW60 with an Audi S7, a personal favourite, or perhaps it'd be better to call it a cousin of the RS etron GT, which is closer given the full electric powertrain.  Nonetheless it shares with the Prius the same swoopy arched roofline that runs smoothly from bonnet lip to spoiler lip, with continuous glass and spadelike nose with geometric headlights, ad even without a widebody it has those quite pronounced hips that always give a car incredible authority of presence, along with black side skirts. It's a pity it lacks the identifying text that Polestars wear on the front flank identifying the car and listing power specs, but we instead get full front, top and rear details of lights and badges, plus a 'Polestar 5' rear showroom number plate.  Super handsome car.

Lately I posted about how I expect Chinese cars to be excluded from major diecast brands for the time being, but this Polestar may prove me wrong by the back door.  Polestar are spun off from Volvo in much the same way as Cupra are spun off from SEAT - a top-level trim that became its own marque.  But Volvo and Polestar are now owned by Geely, one of China's major car brands, and the cars they've produced since Geely became their new dad all use platforms common to other Geely brands, so the case could be made that these are Chinese, not Swedish cars, or that they have a nationality hyphen.

However I feel so far Geely have done a pretty good job of not imposing themselves on either Volvo or Polestar, meaning they still feel Nordic and stylish in ways that Chinese designed cars are not quite managing to compete with yet.  They've come a very long way but perhaps two of the last major hurdles that Chinese brands are yet to clear are the lack of a reputation for quality and safety, along with maturity and coherence of design language.  Volvo is the world leader in car safety, in reputation if not fact, so that one's basically theirs to fumble. 

We're going for the chimeras this time.  This, in case you haven't read my post on the taxonomy of fantasy cars, is my word for the particular kind of fantasy cars that assembles styling touches from numerous cars of a similar type in one unreal yet eminently plausible vehicle.  Matchbox has a good line in off-road chimeras, although less these days than they did back in the '00s and '10s, whereas Hot Wheels has been most accomplished at doing this with Americana-flavoured cars since they first started out, making the likes of hot rods and muscle cars, but in recent years seems to have branched out creatively into European and Japanese cars, both of which are more my speed.  Here we have three such examples.

First, the delectable El Segundo Coupé.

This stunner is not just beloved by me, at this stage it's a modern classic of the Hot Wheels fantasy car line, as evidenced by them putting it in the Fan Driven collection.  It got white aerodiscs as released, which looked better than I expected, but the décor is the most modern it's been yet, leaning on the more up-to-date aspects of the design rather than the classic elements seen in most previous deco schemes.  I had to have it.  Although I was OK with the aerodiscs, I ended up disassembling it to get the windows and interior piece separated for detailing, and while I was in there, I switched the wheels for a spare set of silver lace wheels.  I wanted to use Matchbox tri-lugs, but the track width of the spare set I have was too narrow.  Still, I have another which has lace wheels and it's nice to experiment.  Luckily, the next of our trio was looking to donate chromed E10SPs, and what do you know, they work pretty darn well in this application.

I threatened to do this previously, but with the 2026 version of the Hako Type D in a new livery, the time to wade a bit deeper into this assemblage of iconic late '80s and early '90s Japanese sports car features has arrived.

This release had the new-ish E10SP wheels when I got it, nice enough wheels but they don't really feel right on this car in terms of the car's era, the FC3 3-spokes the original release wore work a lot better by my reckoning.  Sadly they are still quite rare - but what about those white aerodiscs from the El Segundo Coupé?  Or even better, if I raid the wheel box, I can have some aerodiscs at the front and give a home to a single orphaned pair of white ten-spokes at the back.  A lot better, I think.  And the E10SPs go great on the El Seg!

This new look for the car is the third release, after the debut white and second colour red - I skipped the red, but I slightly regret it. 

This year it's getting only one release (at least, as far as I know) in a shade of what I like to call 'institution green' but the details show us an angle that is a little less obvious.   The broad black stripe with gold lettering on the doors that reads 'HAKO TYPE D' is a clear homage to the lettering on the R30 generation Skyline HT 2000 Turbo RS, the closest that generation got to a GT-R. 

This is an interesting choice, as the car's front end much more obviously borrows from the R32 Skyline and S13 Sylvia, and the bonnet is more R34 than anything else with the off-centre NACA intake, but arguably the section below the front bumper is relatively closer to the R30.  Interestingly, the R31 is as usual ignored in this lineage.  People call the R33 underrated, but the R31, one of the first cars ever to get active aero, barely ever gets mentioned.

If the front is mostly Nissan, the side profile is mostly Toyota.  The obvious touchstone is the AE86 Sprinter Trueno with its distinctive boxy fastback, and an argument could be made for A60 Supra influence, but for my money the best comparison is the ST165 Celica GT-Four. 

All of those were pop-up light cars, though, unlike the Type D; in that respect the front also invites comparison with the Corolla Levin, the Trueno's notchbacked sister car which lacked the pop-up lights. 

There are other non-Toyota influences, too.  The split side window is pure Subaru SVX, and the side skirts look like racing kits found on many cars. 

The roof spoiler shares a lot with the Silvia S13, as does the C pillar in some ways.

So, Nissan at the front, Toyota to the side, but to the rear it's a Mazda; the other obvious comparison for the car is the FC RX-7.  The Porsche 924/944 was the intended comparison for that car, and the wrap-around rear window glass and lip spoiler that Mazda borrowed from Porsche are in turn borrowed again for the Type D, as are the horizontally banded tail lights and jutting rear bumper.  As well as the rear end, the body kit's box flares are somewhere in between the R32 Skyline and a slightly accentuated FC RX-7.

Some features I can't quite nail down.  The distinctive spoiler looks infuriatingly familiar but evades me (feels like it should be matte black plastic, probably sun-baked; the best I've got is MR2, maybe?).  It makes me want to look beyond Japan, in fact, just as many of Japan's designers learned to, to cars like the Fiero and the DeLorean which it has some affinity for. 

As for the little triple-slot vents on the C-pillar and front quarters, I find them delightful and entirely appropriate yet I can't think of anything else that they might belong to; rather than the specific forms, the general idea of such a detail in designs of this era and context seems to be the thing that makes them fit.  Details like those, and the popped sunroof, the lines on the rear window that equally call to mind heated rear glass and louvres, or the frosted edges, make the car feel technological and well-equipped.  The Type D is layered.

Last, well, I touched on my custom Kei Swap earlier, so here is the 'after' part, having drilled it open and acetoned most of the decals off.  This is less of a chimera than the others; I categorise this as a 1993 Daihatsu Atrai S130C with a body kit and, of course, a Honda K-series engine from a Civic Type R swapped in.  While there's enough Shakotan Testarossa-style fiberglass added on that it could plausibly be several trucks under all that, I stand by my designation, despite seeing some say it's a Honda Acty; my take is that the body kit sort of resembles an Acty, or possibly an early Suzuki Carry, in that it uses distinctive round lights, partly obscured to make the truck look angrier, but I think the shape of the actual body beneath the questionable cosmetic surgery is distinctly Daihatsu, as is the asymmetric grille.

Kei trucks are everywhere in Japan, they literally keep the rural economy going, you often find them with a 'JA' farmer's union decal.  Open-backed trucks are the most common sight, but vans are also a given in any car park, usually silver or most often white.  Unlike most cars in Japan, which are often kept in a spotless condition by their owners, commercial keis are consumable equipment and often somewhat the worse for wear.  As for customised vans, loopy body kits are not that often seen and while they are around, the height of their popularity has passed and the few you see around tend to look a bit past their sell-by dates.

I wanted to bring a flavour of this shabby side of Japanese traffic to this nifty little truck, combined with the infamous British 'white van man' stereotype, with plenty of rust, daubs of primer, half peeling decals and scuffed fibreglass. To properly execute this, I did indeed take the plunge and exchange the white skirts/interior piece of the pink Kei Swap with the new black one, and that too worked out well. The Pink one had the most reluctant zamac I've encountered in ages, though - not only did it snap one of my drill bits, the other rivet took way more work than normal. But honestly, this was all worth it. I'm properly satisfied with the results.

While I've got my hands on more trucks than usual this month, I also scored several great cars, including three new releases and a definitive version of a hypercar.  There are a couple of great fantasy cars in there too, but they are for discussion in part 3.

Before that, a car which for 99.999% of us might as well be a fantasy but in fact is not: the Bugatti Bolide. 

Supposedly this car is the last application of the infamous Bugatti W16, and they're making 40 of them only, for €4,000,000 a pop.  This is a track-only hypercar equipped, of course, with the W16 engine and quad turbos making a ludicrous 1600 PS, an amount of power beyond even the Veyron or Chiron's ability to deliver, that can push it to (an electronically-limited, assumedly for the sake of not exploding the tyres) 311mph. 

I just don't know how to react to this car, none of that information really has space to land, it's all so preposterous.  Awesome?  Stupid?  Real?  Imaginary?  Inspiring engineering?  Literally disgusting use of €4,000,000?  All of the above, I suppose.  What I do know is that the previous release in black with yellow based on official Bugatti paint failed to stir much in me, but this is a different story.  I still don't find I love it, but it is very cool with this paint and livery, much better than the official Bugatti colour scheme. 

I hope this settles any misunsderstandings about the admittedly knotty nationality of the marque; one might imagine Bugatti's consistent use of Bleu de France would make it clear, but there are those who claim it should be counted as Italian since Ettore Bugatti was an Italian and/or because of the resurrection of the company in an Italian factory to make the EB110, or German for its period of VW ownership, or Croatian for its current merger with Rimac.  A French tricolore livery seems pretty conclusive (wait for someone to claim it's a Dutch flag…).

From one sports car (kind of) that I'm conflicted about to another, albeit a less vanishingly rare one: A Porsche 911 Carrera T, newly cast for this year. 

I make no secret of the fact that while I respect the 911, I have never loved it.  I prefer the 928 and 924/944 if I'm required to go for Porsche, and would choose a 935 or 959 ahead of a 911.  But the 911 is a fact of life if you like sports cars, and must be engaged with if you, for example, curate a collection focused on design evolution, as I try to.  I read that there are 26 different flavours of 911 presently offered for sale, and while I have a 992 (current-generation) GT3RS, I realised I didn't have a current-generation 911 in road car form. 

The soapy smoothness of the 992 generation is even more evident without the track aero, which is not really for me, but it has certainly looked worse across the car's history.  Visually, the 911's status as a sort of default sports car/statuswagen for the unimaginative is entirely in keeping with a 'millenial grey' (myself, I prefer the term 'landlord grey') paintjob, although I wasn't into the black roof so I deleted it. 

The well-executed stripes with faux-Porsche 'hot wheels' script are simultaneously pretty cool and uncomfortably cringe.  The interior has an easter egg, too, a pair of teddy bears in the passenger seat; the wiki claims the car is based on one owned by Hot Wheels' generic bigwig /global head of design Ted Wu, which explains that; cheesy, but it brings personality to a car that I find honestly lacks it. 

Really, I've got to wonder if Wu's is landlord grey with Hot wheels decals too? is the FPY86 licence plate accurate? I wouldn't put it past an exec VP in charge of scalpability (or whatever) to use stock-keeping codes for number plates.  Still, glad to have this anyway.

Another one I'm glad to have found is this Mini.

The classic Mini remains enough of a cult vehicle that it consistently demands a premium on eBay, and while Hot Wheels have released the van and pickup versions not that long ago, few appropriately scaled versions of the iconic basic car exist.  I almost pulled the trigger on a Siku pizza delivery version (anything pizza-adjacent is welcome in my collection) once, but hummed and haahed for too long and lost it, and Hot Wheels' rather large Morris Mini casting had a "Pop-offs" version that could be disassembled by unlatching a catch on the base, a great feature which naturally makes it even more sought after, and hence costly and scarce.  All of which meant that I couldn't find an affordable good one, and so I am ashamed to admit I'm only now getting a classic Mini, 1120 cars deep into a collection. 

This is an Austin Mini Cooper S, not that it makes any difference at this scale, and although the car is not dissasemblable (at least, not officially), it too has an easter egg: gold bars in the boot! [insert Michael Caine impression of your choice here, in lieu of impossible to photo gold - I have no particular desire to dismantle it].  The use of a slightly yellowy shade of 'institution green', a supposedly calming shade of desaturated but mid-toned and rather herb-like green often used in mental hospitals for its grounding effect (and as a result the title of a Suzanne Vega song), is a perfect colour for a post-war British car, and the white roof and bonnet stripes are accurate details.  The white blank roundels are apt too for a car with such a storied racing heritage; those three mysterious white triangles are a more idiosyncratic touch we've seen on Jaguar Mk. I's lately, although I haven't seen these on real cars before.  My guess is it may somehow connect to Fraser Campbell, the designer of both cars.  The scale of this Mini is superbly judged, feeling smaller than many castings but in precisely correct-feeling proportion, and my feeling is that it's a great casting, realistic, detailed and charming.

Lastly, three wishes were granted at the same time.  I previously expressed a hope that more Maserati castings would be be released, and separately for classic racer castings to be released with the new but specialised WWIM ("wire wheel in motion") wheels, and alongside this, I've always wanted to see more late 50s and early 60s sports car racers made as diecasts, this period of design produced some of the loveliest, most elegant yet savagely capable cars ever built as cars transitioned from handcrafted workpieces to industrial products.  The 1959 Maserati Tipo 61 is all of these things and more.

My knowledge of Maserati is generally less than other Italian marques, but I have heard the name "Birdcage" used around racing Maseratis many times without knowing what it was; one of those "hmm, must look that up later, but anyway… [does other stuff, forgets]" things.  So, it turns out the Tipo 61 is in fact the best known of the Birdcage Maseratis. The name comes from the unusual chassis, made in the pre-monocoque era from unusually short steel rods welded into a lighter than usual, complicated yet rigid space frame that gave the car a significant racing edge over conventional tubular frame cars, one of those minor yet groundbreaking innovations that is another step in the evolution of racing cars overall. 

It weighed just 600kg but made 250 hp from a 2.9 litre straight-4 mounted at a diagonal to keep the weight low down, not much power by today's standards but a pretty great power/weight ratio and set of driving dynamics in any money.  The Birbcage also had another feature I always enjoy: a not-quite-cheating feature that games the rules, in this case the windscreen, which Le Mans rules at the time specified had to be of a specific minimum height, is recessed into the bodywork, reducing its aerodynamic profile while still technically adhering to the rules.

The Birbcage was notably driven by Stirling Moss, Caroll Shelby and Dan Gurney, among others, and campaigned by Briggs Cunningham, but this livery is partly a pastiche of the one used by the Camoradi team's 1960 Nurburgring 1000km winning #24 car, and partly one worn by a car with just this specification - given the coachbuilt nature of cars then, the aero behind the driver's head is not present on most of these and several had a different windscreen design, making this specific car distinct - that is owned by Nick Mason, Pink Floyd member and owner/lover of many more amazing classic cars.

This casting reproduces the birbcage-style construction on visible areas of the cockpit.  The chrome interior is great for the side exhaust and cockpit structure, but the seat really requires paint to look right. 

As I hoped, the WWIM's look great, particularly with the new silver hubs, and capture the characteristic look of sports racers of the era nicely.  I wish the striping followed the bodywork better, but generally I am delighted by this casting and can't praise it highly enough.

Having been denied government funding for a couple of months my eBaying has necessarily been paused and I'm on new stock only at the minute.  Still, got some neat stuff going on, for no particular reason consisting of an unusually high proportion of trucks of one or another type.

Today I was lucky enough to encounter a new-for-2026 Matchbox 1980 Jeep J10 Stepside. 

Like seems to happen often, this Matchbox is a 'normal life' version of an amped-up Hot Wheels release; last year we saw a couple of J10s in the guise of Baja racing vehicles, tricked out with fat wheels, cooling fans, spares and a big roll cage, so it's nice to have a more everyday incarnation of this truck. 

The overall style, with stripes apprpriate to the J10's top-level "Honcho" trim (linguistics aside: for many years I thought this was a Mexican Spanish word, but it's Japanese!  本庁 means 'main government office' or similar - hence "head honcho" as a key authority figure...) and a rollbar in the bed is very period correct. Love the white wheels. It reminds me of the Dodge D-100 Dakota that Matchbox made in the late 80s, although the Dodge did the rollbar a lot more pleasingly.   

Until the Hot Wheels version I had no idea this truck even existed, but especially seen next to the grey and black 1988 Cherokee from a couple of years back it's plainly visible that this shares the SJ chassis and some bodywork, not unlike the Chevrolet Blazer and C series.

On the subject of the Chevrolet C series, I finally caved today and got an example of a classic Hot Wheels casting, the '83 Chevy Silverado, an SWB C10 of the era.

Me being a boxy '80s car afficionado and the Silverado being an iconic truck of the era, and this having been made about 724 times, you might reasonably expect I'd be all over this. However, I've always avoided this truck for what all comes down to the same thing: I hate the low stance. 

I like trucks to be trucks, not hot rods or lowriders, and I don't like the effect lowering it has had on the bed, pulling out the bed lining and wheel arches for the space to lower the body, nor the usual liveries this results in the truck being given.  I have no interest in an off-roader modified to become useless.  Then again, it's always been on the cards that I could lift it again, so my intent with this was always to do just that. 

I drilled it open, removed the axles, modified the base with some lateral grooves below where the axles go, drilled some holes either side, placed the axles in the grooves and the plan was then to use wire loops to keep the axles in place.  However, when testfitting the body on the axles it immediately became clear the original wheels were ridiculously small, so I had to raid the wheel box to replace them; these work OK, they are definitely road wheels, not offroad as I would prefer, but they are a decent size and proportion compared to the body and the arches. From below it's not super elegant, but it looks fine once viewed from most normal viewing angles.

Another Matchbox truck that hit recently Ridge Raider II, which a little atypically for recent Matchbox is a fantasy desert racer.  However, it's wearing a livery that the first Ridge Raider, another fantasy desert racing truck, wore in only its second release in 2008.

 I have an eye on getting hold of the 2008 versions once I have some money to throw at ebay postage, but not quite yet.  R.R.II is a fairly handsome, stubby and aggressive little creature, but doesn't stand up to scrutiny that well.  it received only two tampo passes and therefore it was down to me to detail the front and rear (the J10 also only got two tampos, but the chrome base forming the bumpers, grille and lights covers a multitude of sins).

That's one issue, but the most troublesome is the spare tyres.  There are two visible in the back, cast into the zamac, and two visible through the open top, moulded as a part of the interior… but geometrically they can't be the same pair of tyres.  Either they are stored squashed, which seems daft, or one has been sawn in half, because otherwise they would have to clip through each other like bad game CG.  It's a weird casting detail fail that clearly was done to accommodate the rear rivet, and the solution seems obvious: delete the cast back ones and leave the back open, where the moulded ones  can be visible from both sides but have the rivet running through the middle.  There must be a reason why this happened, but this is another tale of diecast design we'll likely never hear.  It doesn't wreck the casting, but it's a distraction from what ought to be a really good car.

The Matchbox Gritter King is another 2026 new model with issues.  It's a quite nicely sculpted snowplough and gritter with a minor gimmick, namely that it has a functional grit hopper with small openings in the bottom so it will actually dispense small quantities of grit, or salt, or sugar, or rat poison, or cocaine, or whatever powder or fine granule you favour most. 

I've not tested this function as I don't tend to particularly favour any powders or granules, but that's a nice feature for play.  For display, the main issue this car presents is immediately obvious: no glass, with the cab windows represented by glossy faces of the interior piece that forms the hopper.  This is a new sibling in the '[something] King' european-style utility cabover lorry family, joining a road stripe painter, a concrete mixer and a dustbin lorry, and sharing its lack of cab windows with the road stripe painter.  It's cool enough and looks good in MBX Construction livery (especially with added hazard stripes on the plough blade) but even though I do freely admit I don't have a lot of practical experience at managing budgets for multi-billion dollar toy companies, I still can't help thinking this is a bit unnecessarily cheap.

The next one was an instant buy, though: a 2023 Ford E-Transit Custom, Ford's latest electric incarnation of their bestselling commercial. 

The Ford Transit Van is to the UK what the F-150 is to the USA or the Hiace is To Japan: something driven in a variety of forms by tradespeople in hundreds of different professions, from skilled construction trades to delivery to taxi driving; cops drive them, and so do bank robbers. They are a common sight all across Europe too, although VW, Mercedes Renault, Peugeot and Fiat vans compete more strongly on the mainland.  And so because it's so overwhelmingly common, people have them as personal vehicles, customise them in millions of ways and generally go bananas over them.  For over 60 years this has been a ubiquitous vehicle across the UK, and across the world. 

This is ultimately why my neighbours spend the greater part of the warmer months of the year sitting with their mates on the pavement performing mystic rituals on a revolving parade of Transits, taking pieces off, banging them with tools or each other while singing and shouting magic spells, and in the end putting them back together better, or at least it sounds like that's roughly what they are doing out there.  Their eldrich Transitmancy rituals have raised my awareness of the cult of Transit, and thus like an assassin with a copy of Catcher in the Rye, I was unable to stop myself buying this attractive blue oblong on wheels when I enountered it.  See how it glitters! Ia, ia, Transit fthagn!

The next truck I've harvested from the winter crop is this Matchbox 2016 Chevy Colorado.

Since Chevy is barely present here in the UK at all and pickups are only ever close to common in very rural UK traffic (although there are now markedly more around in urban trafic than they used to be in 2013) this is another model I am unfamiliar with, but research reveals this is not a fully US model truck either, and it exists here in the UK in the form of the D-Max, branded with that most forgotten yet still extant Japanese kind-of-GM marque: Isuzu! 

The Colorado is sold in the US, where it replaced the chevy S-10 series as the smaller (but still damn big) GM pickup chassis, but for most of the rest of the world, the Colorado was built in Thailand.  This particular truck is the Z71 Colorado Xtreme (misspelled by Matchbox as 'Extreme', or rather officially misspelled by Chevy as if it were still 2003 and that was still cool, and then erroneously corrected by Matchbox), which is a concept model built to display at a Thailand car expo in 2016 by GM Thailand as an indication of what a top-trim performance off-road truck might look like, were they to build one.  Supposedly it was also meant to be an indication of GM's commitment to the Thai market, which is odd as they pulled out of Thailand in 2020, and the factory now only produces this truck as a D-Max.

The casting has mock mud in a pale tan, along with pale tan wheels.  I like the concept, but the execution I don't reckon much, the pale mud just doesn't work that well, so I felt I had to add a contrasting shade, and the mud pen appeared again, along with more black on the snorkel, roof rack and rear rollbars.  Things were looking pretty bad without any front detail either, so that had to be done too. I'm still not quite convinced by the wheels, but it's better overall, I feel.

Finally, the welcome return of one of my newest faves, the Kei Swap. 

This customised kei van with a Civic Type R K-series engine transplant gets a new livery, and it's…all right.  I don't hate it, its decent.  But also, I don't love it, and it's not a patch on the absolutely glorious livery I named a runner up in the Best Deco category for the Main Line Diecast Awards 2025.  Not really worth preserving, to be honest, so these are the 'before' images. 

Crucially, the body paint is white, which I hoped we'd get sooner or later, and I have some acetone just over there.  Also, I've recently been practicing my rust effects on decrepit old Matchbox castings, plus making primer grey body panels is nice and simple with the grey paint pen. Plus, the award-winning sculpting on the newly black bumper/side skirts/interior piece are still great…whereas the pink version has a white bumper and skirts…black looks nice with pink, doesn't it?  And so the chance for me to make the most disreputable Kei van you've ever seen comes gradually into view. As my personal folk religion, the Secret Cat Policy, tells us, the shot will resolve.  Just need to dismantle it, plus the pink one, despite it breaking my 1.8mm drill bit off in its rear rivet.  But I can do it, my right hand strength is improving gradually, or at least I want to believe it is.

If you're into diecasts you're familiar with the idea of a manufacturer's product line having a hierarchy of quality, and if you've been into this a while you'll be aware that it's a relatively new idea, and premiums haven't always been around.  I didn't realise until researching for this post that Real Riders go back to 1983, when Larry Wood and Bob Rosas created a series intended for adult collectors with rubber tyres. It was certainly a relative of present-day premiums, though pretty different. But what if I told you that Lesney Matchbox was doing premiums a bit closer to modern ones way back in 1989, in the form of the World Class series?

The current state of the quality hierarchy, at least in the Mattel fiefdom, is like this:

Set against this, Matchbox's World Class cars are somewhat tricky to position. Just the name alone conveys that these have a singular focus as a part of their concept, and as products, these are supposed to be an enhanced, luxury experience. The model selection (yes, back on that again) bears that out. It's interesting to look at this  in comparison to the Hot Wheels Real Riders series of 1983, which simply featured popular vehicles of many kinds, from Hot Rods to snowploughs, with little in the way of a theme. I wouldn't quite call them premium in the same way premiums nowadays are premium, there was less thought put into presentation, and metal bases were the norm on mainline cars and not seen as special.

By contrast, World Class Series 1 from 1989 was a line focused on widely coveted and idolised sports cars.  They featured 3 Porsches, 2 Ferraris, a Corvette, a Mercedes and a Lamborghini - all of which are still nowadays very exotic, iconic and stylish cars (with the possible exception of the Corvette C4 convertible, a beautiful car that I think is unfairly derided).  The AMG above remains elusive, the cheapest I can see being a touch above £24 -I wish the period price sticker was what they still went for! I really struggle to find fault with the line-up of the first series in terms of being attractive models, which is why I've decided, somewhat uncharacteristically for me, to try and get a complete set of all of the first series.  Naturally, being 37 years old most of them - that are affordable - are pretty worn and chipped, and only one of the ones I presently own are pristine.  I honestly wouldn't change that, I really appreciate the idea that someone like me enjoyed these cars, and I have decided to look at the damage as a chance to practice my rust detailing. Maybe these are from the Sultan of Brunei's peerless collection of ruined supercars...

All of them were castings that also appeared in the 1-75 range, Lesney's 75-car version of what we nowadays think of as the main line, but with more real-worldy deco schemes than the 1-75 versions.  In some cases they are modified versions that actually delete the opening doors.  Their bases vary, but in 1989 metal bases were often used for basic cars, with plastic bases a feature that was becoming more frequently used but was not yet the norm, so they are not really distinct in that respect - if it had a metal base in 1-75, it probably does in World Class.  Perhaps more unusual is that the bases were painted, usually in body colours.  Many 1-75 cars had unpainted or grey metal bases.

One of the more distinctive features of this series, at least at first, is the mirrored windows.  The windows are entirely opaque, and cars lack an interior piece in some cases such as the 928 and 944, but some cars still have an interior, either for features like the engine cover vent inserts on both of the Ferraris, or perhaps to properly support window pieces, as on the Lamborghini - the 928 and 944 are both cars with opening door deletes so they presumably also were altered to fit the window pieces without interiors.  Maybe it would have cost Matchbox more to retool the window piece so an interior wasn't needed than to just include an unseen one.   In general the effect is remarkably classy and I'd love to see it make a comeback, perhaps in a semi-transparent form. 

Mirrored windows also featured in modified form, with stylised black shadows, in the short-lived and now hard to find track-focused Lightnings series, as did many of the same castings.  Lightnings could credibly be called the Matchbox forerunner to the HW Speed Machines series, track-focused premiums with special wheels, but that's an idea to focus on in future. In the case of the C4 Corvette, the only convertible in the first series, the interior has painted seats - that wasn't me this time. The frame of the windscreen is also painted from the factory, unlike the 1-75 series 'main line' version of the car.

The wheels and tyres of World Class cars are of course another notable feature.  Visually they rival Hot Wheels Real Riders as we know them today, with several different wheel designs, tyres with treads and even licenced Goodyear Eagle tyre lettering which still somewhat survives even on my more battered examples - none of mine, however battered, have split tyres either, despite being nearly 40 years old. They are not without issues, though, most of them being wider than the standard wheels for which the castings were originally designed and as a result poking out beyond the arches of the cars in a way modern fitment nazis would not tolerate, but they are certainly a major selling point for these cars.  Most of the poke can be ameliorated by careful adjustment of position, and since they are more for display than rolling around play (they also don't roll anything like as smoothly as Hot Wheels Real Riders) the issue is largely moot in my view.

Series 2 in 1990 added 8 more cars, including a broadened focus now including luxury cars (Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, Lincoln Town Car, Cadillac Allante, Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe) alongside more contemporary exotic sports cars (Ferrari F40, BMW M1) and classic sports exotica (Corvette Grand Sport, Jaguar XK120) and introducing whitewall tyres rather than Goodyear Eagles for some, uniquely in series 2.  The Corvette Grand Sport is notable for being one of very few in this series to be released with a racing livery, and uniquely three of these have whitewall tyres rather than lettered Goodyear tyres.

The 1991 third series was the first re-release of any of the previous castings, with the Countach and Testarossa from the first series returning in new colours. This series also introduced a Japanese car into the otherwise very occidental line, a Nissan 300ZX Z32, but it remained the only one from anywhere east of Italy until an RX7 FD was added in 1995.  Presumably the luxury car angle was a slower seller, as the series refocused back onto performance cars from this point and largely avoided luxury models.

World Class continued from 1992 onwards as a six-car-per-year series, ultimately across 31 different castings for six series total in as many years until 1995, when it was replaced by a series called Premiere Collection World Class.  This 25,000 piece limited series kept the rubber wheels, and introduced chromed wheels rather than silver-grey along with collector boxes and multiple consecutive six-car-series issues per year, but was also distinct in that it scrapped the mirrored window pieces, giving all cars clear untinted glass and interiors.  Coinciding with the sale of the Matchbox brand to the American firm Tyco in 1992, it also made a considerable pivot to the western edge of the Atlantic, with a higher proportion of models either being American cars or being cars sold in the US market, with European models becoming relative rarities.  Premiere eventually dropped the World Class name entirely.

This Dodge Viper was one of those Premiere World Class cars, from Premiere World Class series 4 in 1996. I was out of my childhood diecast collecting by that point and don't recall these, but I'm not convinced these Premiere series cars were ever very popular in the UK, nor widely available, they are less plentiful nowadays and the selection was always less relevant to European tastes.

Back in the day I had a few of these (944, 308, AMG, C3, Viper , all from pre-Premiere series 1, 3 and 5), they were fairly infrequent finds and pricey relative to the ordinary matchbox cars, but I always liked them and wanted to get more.  But there I unknowingly bumped up against an early iteration of the eldritch power that is active behind all today's diecast manias: FOMO.  Unlike 1-75 series cars at the time, which were restocked through the whole run of each model which might last multiple years, it seems that each World Class series was for one year only - stock hung about a while as they were more expensive than standard 1-75 models, but they were uncommon and scarce, and if you missed them, they were gone.

Arguably, I also encountered another prototypical element of the modern diecast world, in the form of chases.  I looked for years before I found an orange T-top C3 Corvette like the one I had way back, my very favourite Corvette, that defined how I visualised the C3 and made that Corvette generation my favourite.  The World Class version was always scarce, and most that I found online, including the one on the wiki and the ones on sale, were blue; nice enough, but where was my orange one?  Only when I hunted through the gallery on the car's particular page did I find a pic of the orange one described as an 'alternate colour', but clearly more rare than the blue one.  It took me ages to find one, and luckily it's in the best condition of all the Word Class cars I have.  Did I accidentally have a proto-chase as a kid?

I would argue that perhaps Mattel looked back at the World Class series as a starting point for developing the Premiums they began to sell in the 2010s, especially the Car Culture series.   A lot of the ideas that World Class tried first became mainstays features of premium Hot Wheels series:

small, achievably collectable selection with a tight thematic focus;

castings from the main series given higher quality and more real-world-esque deco and detailing;

heightened package presentation, with numbered releases and emphasis on collectability;

limited releases.

Compare this to something like Hot Wheels Boulevard or the 5-car premium and silver series sets today and this 1989 innovation is easy to see as a kind of a harbinger of what was to come.