Autoblog

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]

Click the image above to view Polly Wheels in action

Most of the Autoblog readers have been fostering a love for the automobile since a very early stage in life. We collected Hot Wheels and Matchboxes, and we had model cars and remote-controlled hot rods. The one thing those toys have in common is that they're marketed almost exclusively to boys.

Mattel has decided to give the girls what they've wanted all along: race tracks, pink cars that go shopping, and a great way to compete. Earlier we gave you an extensive debriefing on Polly Wheels, complete with an Autoblog Gallery, and now we're adding video, too. Check out the Autoblog interview with Stephanie Cota, Vice President of girls marketing at Mattel. There is also some exclusive footage of a prototype Polly Wheels Race Track in action. Check it out!

Update: We just added a gallery of high-res photos of the Polly Wheels collection.



There is an exhibit area at the New York Auto Show with a staggering 1,190 vehicles on display. And it's "manned" by a trio of vivacious pre-teens playing "Race to the Mall" with a new line of die-cast toy cars made just for girls.

Polly Wheels, the latest offering from Mattel based off the Polly Pocket line of dolls, made its official debut at the New York Auto Show today. Fifty different models will be released in all this year, and about 20 are already out. The unique toys were designed with heavy input from girls, based on their insights and play patterns. The cars are heavy into candy colors and glitter, as a result. And in a switch from Mattel's boy-based line of cars, the Polly Wheels feature a removable "friend" in the driver's seat.

The 2-inch cars, which retail for just under $3 each, are a little more generic if not cartoonish than the faithful representations found in the Mattel Hot Wheels and Matchbox lines. In fact, only the chassis is die-cast; the bodies are plastic so the wild colors, such as "Splashin' Pink" and "Glitter Peach", can stand out. The "Race to the Mall" raceset retails for $34.99 and will be available in June.

John Neff checked in from SEMA all excited about Mattel's Hot Wheels booth and we totally understand. We'd be willing to bet that many regular Autoblog readers have 1:64 scale hot rods doing 360s on their desks.

Mattel knows their market, and sent not only hundreds of their beloved miniature cars, but also flew in three full-sized hot rods.

Hot Wheels fans from the 1960s might remember their toy cars being vibrant, metallic colors. Those hues went away in the 1970s due to the large amount of lead used in their Spectraflame paint. Mattel has now teamed up with PPG to produce a new (hopefully lead-free) Spectraflame paint for adult-sized rides.

Photos of the SEMA Hot Wheels display including the three hot rods after the jump.

HotWheels Radar Gun ($24.99)

Gary Swisher is the guy who has everybody's dream job -- he's the design chief for HotWheels, Tyco and Matchbox, and he's in charge of designing the cool and timeless dream cars in miniature that we only wish we could have when we grow up.

He's also the guy responsible for keeping up with the demanding, tech-savvy tastes of today's kids, and that, friends, is not an easy job considering that today's kids don't know what it's like to live without cell phones, AIM, and the iPod.

BusinessWeek was able to pull Gary aside from that particularly demanding job for a quick interview, in which Swisher lets the reader in on a little secret -- it's not the technology that gets kids juiced about toy cars, it's how you use it. "Having technology is not the feature," Swisher said. "The magic that it brings to the toy is the feature."

And it's not as easy as it sounds -- Swisher says that competing with video games for kids' time and attention is an extraordinary challenge. We think they're on to something with the HotWheels Radar Gun (pictured). Now all we need is the HotWheels Radar Detector and optional Handlebar Mount so our kids can play the same cat-and-mouse game that we do as adults.

[Source: BusinessWeek]