A toy car story that’s fit for children of all ages
A Hot Wheels or a Matchbox car speaks to a child’s imagination
The privileges of fatherhood are many and varied. A repertoire of corny jokes suddenly pops into your head. You develop uncanny Dad Strength, and gain secret and arcane knowledge about exterior decking. You instantly know if someone, somewhere has left a light switch on.
The best bit though, is that you can walk into a grocery store, pick a Hot Wheels off a shelf, look the cashier dead in the eye and say, “It’s for my kid,” with a completely straight face.
For many gearhead dads and moms, these little toy cars are the gifts that keep on giving. They’re simple things, and while there’ll be many a big present under the tree, it’s the stocking stuffer that you, I mean your kid, can take anywhere.
This year, Hot Wheels celebrates its 45th year of making die cast cars. They’ve sold well — more than four billion of the things in the past four decades, enough to circle the world eight times placed nose-to-tail.
Meanwhile, former chief rival Matchbox has sold three billion cars, and is celebrating its 60th year in business. Both make toy cars in roughly 1:64th scale, and these days Matchbox falls under Mattel’s company umbrella, along with its brasher American cousin. In 1968, though, they went to war.
In the 1960s, Matchbox was the titan of the die cast model car industry. It had 14 factories across Britain, all operating at top speed and churning out a quarter-million cars a week.
Lesney, Matchbox’s parent company, was founded by a pair of brothers in North London after the Second World War. It was joined by a partner named Jack Odell, and a bombed-out pub called The Rifleman became the home for a small die cast operation that made electrical and industrial components. In the wintertime, with Christmas coming and most warehouses shut for inventory, it would make simple die cast model toys.
Originally, the models were quite large, but Odell’s daughter provided the impetus to scale down. Only toys that could fit in a matchbox were allowed to be brought to her school, so he made his little girl a tiny brass road-roller, tucked it in an old box, and sent her off.
Naturally, when her classmates saw the miniature road roller, they all wanted one too. Odell’s next project was a miniaturized version of the Royal Coach used in the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1952; it ended up selling more than a million units, and provided the capital for the Matchbox empire to start rolling.
The company started officially in 1953 with that road-roller, a dump truck, and a cement mixer.
Beating out rivals such as Corgi and Dinky, the small, highly detailed Matchbox toys were popular for their accuracy. Larger models were also sold, but the brand’s main line was a range of 1:64th scale cars called the 1-75, as there were 75 different models.
When Mattel founder Elliot Handler noticed his grandkids playing with the British-built toys, it sparked first outrage, and then inspiration. But even though Mattel was flush with cash from the blockbuster Barbie line of dolls, the executives didn’t think a line of toy cars was a good idea.
Matchbox was simply too big and too entrenched, they argued; to try to compete would be to fail. Handler had other plans.
He contracted a young designer named Harry Bentley Bradley to come up with a line of toy cars to beat the British Invasion. Bradley was a proper car guy, a former GM designer who was involved with the El Camino and Oldsmobile Toronado, and who would later go on to design his own line of fibreglassbodied lightweight sports cars and the Oscar-Meyer Weinermobile, of all things.
He was also a born hot-rodder, and it was this sunny SoCal obsession with speed that would inform the genesis of the Hot Wheels lineup. Unlike the stuffily correct Matchbox cars, the prototype Hot Wheels had big plastic tires that rolled fast on durable bushings made from a plastic called Delrin. The story goes that one was experimentally pushed across a Mattel boardroom table and Handler exclaimed, “Now those are some hot wheels!”
Bingo, the name was there, but what about the look? The second story making up the lore of early Hot Wheels involves Handler seeing Bradley’s hot-rod sitting in the parking lot, and pointing it out. “That’s what I want,” he said. And that’s what he got.
The first batch of 16 Hot Wheels featured blistering scale performance, and had working, patented torsion bar suspension. They were brighter by far than their Matchbox equivalents, with brilliantly coloured Spectraflame paint and huge, redline wheels. They weren’t as realistic as British-built rivals, but they had hot-rodding appeal, and they shot down their iconic orange tracks and straight into the hearts of little boys everywhere.
The first Hot Wheels ever produced was a dark blue custom Chevy Camaro styled by Bradley. The rest of the first-run range was mostly customs as well, but there were six wilder cars, styled on actual show machines from the likes of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.
The cars sold strongly, far exceeding expectations. Many department stores hadn’t made room on their shelves, also expecting a flop, and Hot Wheels were being sold out of trucks in parking lots. They cost a dollar, and could be purchased individually in blister packs, or with accessories that included the Supercharger, a foam-covered wheel that fired the little cars down sections of track.
Matchbox retaliated almost instantly with a line called Superfast, outfitting their models with the new, slick, fast-spinning plastic wheels.
However, it took time to work the larger wheels into the redesign, and Hot Wheels was gaining ground fast. Well-loved race sets such as the Snake and Mongoose playset that paid homage to funny car dragster rivals Don Prudhomme and Tom McEwen featured looping tracks and unique features.
The suspension was improved, and the number of models increased to include Lotus race cars and wild flights of fancy like the biengined Twin Mill.
Hot Wheels had its own ups and downs with slow sales in the early 1970s, but 1974 saw the emergence of the Tampo printing that’s used to this day. Stripes and numbers were suddenly much easier to add, and the cars regained some of the flash they had lost. Matchbox quickly adopted this process too, and the brands both raced towards the 1980s. It was a race to the finish for Matchbox which was forced into bankruptcy in 1982. A series of changes of ownership would see Mattel eventually acquire its old rival in 1997.
Today, Hot Wheels produces almost five million cars a week. Matchbox soldiers on, the cars now more flashily presented, but still with a little more accuracy and attention to detail than Hot Wheels models.
Aside from special editions and playsets, a single car from either line will set you back a little under two bucks. Real cars depreciate, burn fuel, get stuck in traffic, and need constant servicing. A Hot Wheels or Matchbox car doesn’t do any of that, they simply speak to the imagination of a child — no matter how old that child might be.