The making of the $140,000 Hot Wheels 40th Anniversary car




Earlier this week we brought you amazing photos of a Hot Wheel car Mattel valued at $140,000. "WTF?!," is what we heard from a lot of readers who wondered how a $1 toy could possibly be worth more than their entire collections of late-80s Buicks and/or Mustang IIs.

We asked similar questions, too, and got a series of photos from our buds at Mattel documenting what it took to create what is probably the worlds' most expensive 1:64 scale toy car.

In our previous post, we said most of the value came from the diamonds and rubies on the car's white gold body. We may have been wrong. Studying the photos in the gallery, the amount of patience and painstaking attention to tiny, tiny detail is where at least half the $140k is spent. We get bleary-eyed just thinking about having to place each of the 2,700 jewels in each of those microscopic little holes drilled in the car's 14k body.

So, yeah, $140k is still way too much money to pay for a car you can't even live in, but we now have a little more respect for what it took to create it.

Update: For all you HW collectors out there wondering what model is beneath all that glitter, it looks to be the Custom Otto casting.




[Source: Mattel]

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