Hot Wheels Camaro is a dream brought to life
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There’s a good chance that every kid, and kid at heart, who has played with a Hot Wheels toy car has dreamed of driving such an outrageous ride on the real road.
When the die-cast metal cars hit toy stores in the late 1960s, the first Hot Wheels from the Mattel toy line was a 1:64-scale Chevrolet Camaro. With that in mind, Chevy and Mattel teamed up to build a one-off real life Hot Wheels 2012 Camaro.
Bathed in a custom lime green paint with a chrome finish, the Hot Wheels Camaro is sitting at the Los Angeles Auto Show on a oversized orange platform that ramps up behind the car to resemble the plastic track pieces Mattel has sold as an accessory to the toy cars for decades.
360-degree PANORAMA: Tour the L.A. Auto Show
The wheels, grill and exhaust tips are painted in a menacing black, with red outlines along the edges of those elements of the car -- a nod to the red line on the plastic wheels found on generations of Hot Wheels toys.
A flat black stripe runs from the hood to the roof of the car and onto the trunk. And the hood -- it’s childhood fantasy too, with eight square ports freeing hot air from the engine bay.
Hot Wheels badges adorn the front fenders and rear of the car, as well as black leather bucket seats inside. The specially built Camaro debuted at the SEMA show in Las Vegas in October.
So, back to that dream of getting to drive a real-life Hot Wheels down the road -- that isn’t happening. Chevrolet and Mattel have no plans to put this machine into production.
However, if you really want a bright green Camaro of your own, to match what you see on the show floor, Mattel is selling a limited number of 1:64-scale toy replicas of the car for $19.99 on its website HotWheelsCollector.com.
[Updated Nov. 18, 7:08 a.m.: An earlier version of this story stated that Chevrolet and Mattel would give a limited number of Hot Wheels toy cars out at the Auto Show booth each day of the Auto Show, which is open to the public Nov. 18 through 27. While that was the original plan, Mattel has decided instead to not give the toy cars away with Chevrolet and instead make the replicas available at HotWheelsCollector.com for purchase for $19.99, said Rachel Cooper, a Hot Wheels spokeswoman in an email to the Times.]
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