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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.

Gallery: The making of a $140,000 Hot Wheel car



Gallery: $140k diamond Hot Wheels 40th Anniversary Car


[Source: Mattel]

The making of the $140,000 Hot Wheels 40th Anniversary car originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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click above for more high-res pics

A few years ago, Bruce Pascal paid more than $70,000 for a single Hot Wheels car. The car was an extremely rare rear-loading Beach Bomb with an even more rare pink coat of paint. But it didn't have even a single diamond or ruby, which makes us wonder what Mr. Pascal thinks about this jewel-encrusted toy car commissioned by Mattel to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Hot Wheels.

Jeweler to the stars, Jason of Beverly Hills, transformed this $1 toy into a $140,000 dust-collecting bauble. Almost every surface of the car is covered in some type of precious stone. The car's 18-karat white-gold body shimmers with blue diamonds, the base features white and black diamonds, rubies are set in the car's taillights, and black diamonds were used on the car's tires. Even the tiny interior is jeweled as is the engine. There are 2,700 jewels on the car at a weight of nearly 23-karats.

The car was introduced at the 2008 Toy Fair in New York by Nick Lachey (who's sorry now, Jessica?), who will auction off the toy later this year with the proceeds going to Big Brothers Big Sisters. The lucky (by which we mean having more money than sense) winner will also get a custom-made display box that features 40 more diamonds, one for each year of Hot Wheels production.

Gallery: $140k diamond Hot Wheels 40th Anniversary Car


[Source: Gizmodo, Mattel, Photos by Rob Loud/Getty]

Continue reading $1 Hot Wheels car blinged out to $140,000

$1 Hot Wheels car blinged out to $140,000 originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 18 Feb 2008 10:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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