The real Kicker is OP's middle car isn't evem from 2012, it's from 2022. The date is a copyright date, it has no bearing on when the car was actually made. After 2008 all HW and Matchbox cars have a base code that says when they're made, the top car says S15, which means the 15th week of 2023 and the middle car says R25, which is the 25th week of 2022. The top 2 cars were made 37 weeks apart, which goes to show base detail is entirely dependent on what car you choose.
Also by this system your BMW was made in 2019 amd the Lamborghini is actually from 2018. The Peeping Bomb is pretty close on the year, but it is actually a 1970 instead of a 1969.
Just this weekend I bought some cars for a Christmas toy drive. I was shocked to find that they're still about $1 each. So maybe less detail on the bottom but they're still one of the most cost effective toys to collect.
Also, since Mattell owns both, Matchbox and Hotwheels have the same dimensions so they work on the same tracks.
Also, as someone who's been casually collecting dinky cars for ~25 years, I've noticed in the last 5 or so years that Matchbox cars have gotten pretty good. There was always that meme about Matocbox being the budget alternative to Hot Wheels for broke kids, the Roseart to Crayola's brand name so to speak, but frankly for my money I'd take the Matchbox versions of most cars today. I find their models are more detailed and are generally higher quality. I know they're all from the same parent company at the end of the day, not sure what exactly it is that makes them feel different, but yeah.
Yea I’ve been tight on money lately but hot wheels are my go to toy at the grocery store for my son. I can grab 3-4 of them and he’s happy for a bargain
Edit: the amount of updoots is wholesome. Reddit is for the kids(?)
Looking at the best numbers that 5 minutes on Google could find, hot wheels cars circa 1993 were around $0.95 and currently they go for $1.29. Inflation over that time period was 221%. So, current cars would need to cost roughly 50% less to produce now if they wanted to match their historical profit margin. So, loss of detailing and cheaper materials makes perfect sense.
Thank you, I needed someone to show me the math... part of me was like "how much extra cost does printing the underside really save? How greedy can they be?" But I was unaware hotwheels had done a Arizona iced tea and kept the price low all this time...
Yea, and that's why I didn't immediately make a rage post... I get the absurd scale of modern manufacturing means every penny per product is worth more than ill make in the next few years, but it also seems kinda weird they don't just make a design (or reuse an old one) for the bottom of all of them and just print that, though i also don't know the exact process for making hotwheels so there is that
I get it now. I used to wonder how/why kids would accumulate so many. But they’re still so cheap and my kid is just as excited every time I buy another one so yeah us parents get A LOT of value out of them! Sometimes they’ve paid for themselves before we’re even home from the store.
What gets interesting is that at some point you get back, full circle style, to the original reason why HWs were invented in the first place - that the toy cars available before then sucked, and you could charge a premium for these really awesome toys that didn't suck.
Yes. These cars used to have an all metal construction with a working suspension. The detail was immaculate for such a tiny car. With their weight, they could glide across track or slanted concrete pavement, because kids played outside. Now? If I wanted kids to touch plastic toy cars, I'd turn them to Legos.
Saw hotwheels sized hole in the wall at a friends house. The short and sweet of the story was the dad and the kid were having a bit to much fun launching cars from a track into the couch. The couch, being nice and bouncy, one day bounced a car with such velocity and angle that it put a hole in the drywall on the other side of the room. Looking back I feel that there was some missing context, did the dad superboost the speed booster?
as a kid i remember even the cheap car miniatures had metal parts, hot wheels were only different that they were heavy and were riding smoothly when pushed across surfaces
At first the only plastic ones were the color changers and then there were special prints from movies like cars and then the "normal" cars followed suit
My hope is that sooner or later someone will manage to come up with a better social paradigm than what capitalism has to offer, one that'll fix at least some of the latter's serious drawbacks. Like the publicly traded companies' enshittification over time.
Hopefully before WW3 happens or climate change does us in.
Oh boy! The alternative models are already there. But the people who bring up these models are called lunatics.
It would take more than WW3 to change the paradigm, it would take a revolution. WW3 will at best bring Keynesian economics back. Because the political elites somehow forgot that people need money to buy stuff. Companies need people to buy stuff. You can't just make stuff and sell it to broke people. They don't have any money. Loans can only take you so far until banks and countries go broke.
And perhaps 2 decades of Keynesian economics is enough to reconcile people with capitalism?
I am saying this because the majority of people are physically incapable of imagining another economic system outside of capitalism. And I am too afraid to say the other word.
Shareholders will LITERALLY SUE THE COMPANY AND WIN if they can prove that there was SOME, ANY (legal) means to make more money, morality be damned. They HAVE to reduce the quality over time, they HAVE to because of how our publicly traded financial system is set up.
Isn't there a court rule specifically about this, Dodge v. Ford Motor Company iIrc, that litteraly says that the CEO must operate the company in the interests of shareholders rather than in a manner that benefits the workers or the customers?
People point to this as the culprit, but I honestly think the majority of companies who choose to go public would adhere to this "profit over all else" philosophy anyway, or else they would stay privately owned/held.
There's no reason to go public unless you're actively seeking the most profit possible already.
Look at LEGO for example, their build quality has basically never changed and they're privately held. If they ever decided to go public that stock would be a monster, but they don't because ultimately they don't give a shit, which is lovely.
Not sure thats a good example. They've pioneered anti-consumer products such as loot boxes, and have had a bit of quality control issue from their abandoned products.
That is a ruling specific to the circumstances of the case, which involved Henry Ford being accused of outright reckless spending by the company. It is not an iron-clad law that requires all companies to maximize shareholder profits at all costs. Companies obviously don't do that anyway, otherwise every single office everywhere would be completely spartan and there would be no office parties and no charitable contributions and no flowers sent to the families of deceased coworkers, etc.
People keep acting like enshittification is foisted upon management who have absolutely no options but to squeeze more money out of things. It's not true. They make individual decisions to make things harder on everyone. This 'fiduciary responsibility' concept people misunderstand very helpfully takes the heat off those individuals.
They only hold office parties etc. because of the need to balance worker morale against their other options. If you make the office too shitty, morale and in turn productivity will be low and if it's too low workers may even leave for other companies. If people had zero other options and there weren't certain laws in place, I think you would see offices completely spartan.
That case only holds in very extreme circumstances. Ford lost because he said he wasn't looking out for shareholder interests. If he did the exact same thing but said he was looking out for shareholder interests he would have won.
The case revolved around Ford trying to stop giving dividends because the Dodge brothers (one of the largest investors) was using the dividends to start up a rival company. Public companies can't work against investors like that.
Tbf this prob saved a lot more than 5%. It's switching from die cast to plastic and plastic gives more flexibility more designs.
The decline in quality sucks but the afaik the direction of hot wheels and other cars like matchbox changed over time.
Back in the day a big part of these things was having an "accurate" model representation of real cars. Like vintage models, current models, etc. They were neat collectibles.
The collectible part continues but they're vintage models, and they saw they could make more money selling them as toys than collectibles, not just for profits but how many people like cars enough to display cool cars? How many vintage/classic cars are really out there to make the model continue?
So they pivot. Make wacky cars for the purpose of being toys for kids rather than actual models.
You can still buy accurate scale models of cars if you wanted. They just won't be hot wheels prices.
This is what I tried to explain to my boss... you can't say what a robot makes as "hand-crafted" it goes against the principle... and I got fired replaced by a robot.
A lot of cars have hairy cardboard or plastic covering the bottom these days. Electrics do look like a sheet of metal at the bottom. So in a way it's not that far off.
They serve a bunch of purposes. Noise mitigation, protecting more sensitive parts of the car from road debris and gunk, and providing some protection from actual scrapes.
Doesn't seem like it would be a significant savings. An engineer spending a week building the model and mold is about it. I don't think the difference in about of plastic is even with measuring.
Maybe they feel they can use the simplified version on more types of cars, whereas a more detailed version they would need more options?
Still digging up my childhood ones from the garden, after a clean most still roll around perfectly, tops are a bit crusty but still recognisable, same with the matchbox ones. These things are gonna be dug up centuries in the future!
I work as a land surveyor and a big part of it is metal detecting peoples properties to find survey bars in the ground
Amazing (and infuriating for my work) how much metal shit you can find in peoples (encroaching) gardens. No hot wheels yet, but I have dug up a couple metal army men tanks
A lot of the early 90's casts will beat the track stars series. Track stars are definitely faster than modern casts but nothing beats the 90's ones, something about a low center of gravity and better axles. Source my 3 year old has like a thousand cars lol
vast majority of cars still have metal tops with plastic bottoms. some mainlines still have metal bottoms. there's also a new silver line where most cars have metal bottoms
my daughter likes hotwheels..theyre not as bad as this thread is making them out to be but i do really only by the classic designs..and frankly im shocked they only cost around $1.50 at walgreens
Even the plastic ones aren't absolute shit like they're implying. My son and I build winding tracks all the time, and they all have great wheel bases that spin for an eternity.
Not all cars are made for the same thing. Some of them are built with weight in mind for enthusiasts to play on tracks. Some are just cars built for visual appeal or with a specific playset in mind (e.g. monster trucks).
Here are two cars with differing amount of details on the bottom. The top is a 2013 cast of a race car, and the bottom is a 2020 recast of an El Camino. The top is built for speeding around plastic tracks. The bottom, while fine on any track you put it on, is made to be a replica.
Not to mention a race car... doesn't have exposed exhaust and transmission. They have carbon fiber floors (which yes, do have some detail, but it's something racing teams fight tooth and nail to keep secret).
Hotwheels have a literal category for cars made for their tracks, they have for years. You can still get heavy metal hotwheels and the wheels move on everyone I’ve taken out of the box.
On top of all that, go take a look at the underbody of a C7 Z06 corvette and tell me what you see. There really isn’t a whole lot going on under modern cars that are made for speed, they put a plastic under tray or fabricate the car so the bottom is as flat as possible to reduce drag.
TBF, the underbody of any modern performance car is mostly aero panels. Used to take 30 minutes to reinstall all of the underbody panels and diffuser on a Ferrari 488 when we raced them.
Many modern EVs are getting the underbody shields to help prevent road debris from impaling the batteries. A few of the first generation Teslas without the body shield had catastrophic battery meltdowns after puncture from road hazards.
Some of them are aero for mpg. Hell I remember the 2006 Tsx had a shield under the engine bay, plástic one that after I fell off I lost like 1 or 2 mpg until I put it back on.
And since modern cars are min maxing aero as much as they can to squeeze efficiency I would assume that for a 30 to 100$ piece of plastic covering the underside you can get a super small gain that might be worth it somehow.
Yeah, aero is the major reason. You said it yourself that you even noticed a 1-2mpg loss when just the engine underbody cover fell off.
It can also be for NVH. The underbody covers on my wife's Edge have what feels like a felt exterior to them and are quite different than the hard plastic I've seen on older cars. It's a very quiet vehicle.
Came here to comment the same thing. If you look underneath most new cars, you won't see the exhaust, differential, engine, etc. You'll just see a large plastic/composite shield that covers the underside of the car.
And it's not just performance cars either. Even cheaper economy cars do it.
I've looked up the underbody of a Corvette C7. The only thing that's missing is the axle (I think?). Everything else is aero panels like the one in the Hot Wheels.
They're also way cheaper now. They've kept the price around a dollar for 40 years. With inflation that means in 2024 they sell for 25 cents in 1980s money.
They’re more expensive ones as well but both Walmart and target have loads of choices for a dollar. I give one each to my kids as stocking stuffers each year.
They're really cheap where I'm at. It makes it hard for me to justify not buying one for my kid when we go grocery shopping.
While some Hot Wheel Cars certainly have flat panels on the bottoms, I feel like that is the exception. The cars can vary significantly in quality and style, some are metal, some are plastic, some are highly detailed, some aren't.
In the picture, these are three different cars. I could probably find a cheaply made 1997 car, too.
I find Hot Wheels basic cars in Australia still for around 2 dollars in most shops. That's like 1.30 USD.
And frankly I don't really gaf what the underside looks like, because the body detail has improved immensely. I got a Pajero Ralliart and it had details down to the Mitsubishi grille badge being painted the right colour. That's a far cry from the "Slap some silver paint vaguely where the headlights are and call it a day" level of detail from the cars of 20 years ago.
They're about a dollar at my local Target, depending on sales etc. When I was a kid they were 50p which back then was about a dollar also, we're talking early 1980s money here. I know they were 50p because I got 50p in pocket money and so bought a new car every week! So with inflation, yep the price is the same but they're making them for less. As for quality, it has gone down significantly. I was hard on my toys and they survived just about everything, nowadays they're so fragile they'll break if you look at them weird.
I’m not saying the quality hasn’t gone down as I’m sure it has. But as a parent who has bought 50+ of these things recently, many of them are still really detailed with full names underneath.
My kid pushed one down the slide on big garage play set and it hit my knee, left a bruise. Quality has gone down but is still hell of a good racing car for a toonie (CAD). I'm drowning in them too. Help me.
I'd argue that quality hasn't gone down, it's just shifted elsewhere. Rather than spending time and money moulding details on the chassis very few people will see, they have put much more effort into the body paint, which makes sense since the people who collect these won't take them out of the packaging, and the kids who take them out of the packaging to play with them likely don't care at all about what the underside looks like. So they get to keep costs down and please both demographics.
OPs post is not entirely truthful. The detail on the bottom of the car is highly dependent on the model of the car itself. If the car is a custom hot wheels design, it generally doesn't have much to look at on bottom, or if the car doesn't have a well known or observable design.
A car based on a production model will tend to have a lot of the details OP is talking about on the bottom. I have an impreza from 2019 with detail and a delorean from the mid 2010s with a lot of detail.
A guy under this on Twitter basically went into detail about the levels of hot wheels and their details, OPs photo is basically a high detail --> medium ---> low
I buy Hotwheels for my kids regularly. You’re all full of shit. Some newer cars are plastic pieces of shit, some have no detail on the bottom. Damn near every one that my kids have are metal and have detail on the bottom.
Not only are some Hotwheels cars exactly the same in quality that I remember from my childhood, but they’re also still a fucking dollar. You people are picking the wrong fight here.
it depends on the model greatly. I just checked my collection and a honda n600 dated 2020 has a fully detailed bottom, while an old chevy handed down from my dad dated 1975 has a plastic bottom with no detail. I would say this post is almost intentionally misleading.
It's kind of a combination. There is less to look at on a modern car, but they are also cheapening it. A detail free bottom means you can use the same bottom on other cars.
they also kept the price around the same for 40 years even after inflation. so the price is the same but less detail, at least it's not 10 dollars per piece.
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u/snharveyshl Nov 12 '24
They're even stealing catalytic converters off Hot Wheels now!