Hot Wheels: 40 Years (Hot Wheels (Krause Publications)) [ハードカバー]

Hot Wheels 40 Years is a very nicely put together book. It is a vast improvement in design, paper quality and everything else from its five years before predecessor Hot Wheels: 35 Years of Speed, Power Performance and Attitude. It is important to point out that although 40 years are covered, this is no field or price guide and only has a very small number of Hot Wheels vehicle photographs inside. Collectors or would be collectors would need to grab a Warman's Hot Wheels Field Guide: Values and Identification or something like this to get prices of and pictures of all the vehicles out there.

What this book is, is a look at the Hot Wheels brand and its history through the eyes of an avid fan and collector. There are many interviews with designers and others associated with Hot Wheels along with many photos, sketches, castings, prototypes and the like. A lot of photos and information are about holiday cars, given as staff bonuses to Mattel employees, which are quite interesting and show the company is or at one time was a fun place to work.

The reader is taken step by step through the design stage of some vehicles. Commentary is also given on the finished product of cars throughout the decades as well as production errors such as VW beetles having the engine up front.

There are places where maybe the authors love for the product stopped him from asking the hard questions. Such as what was the public reaction to the Mystery car packaging (black bubble instead of clear so buyer had a lucky dip type experience, I mean it obviously isn't around anymore, did it just get cancelled due to lack of sales or were customers annoyed with what they got? Also no commentary on the general public's perception, of Hot Wheels being an inferior product to brands such as Matchbox (who are now owned also by Mattel), Corgi or Johnny Lightning and if Mattel plans on trying to lift the Hot Wheels brand image and quality of the vehicles or is content to just compete on a lower price alone?

Hot Wheels being pretty much the cheapest option for die cast car toys meant pretty much everyone had some of these things when they were kids. They are still priced well below Johnny Lightning (although granted their vehicles are more for adult collectors) and Matchbox today so no doubt if you've got kids today they've got some too. This book would make an excellent showing your kids the difference between your childhood and theres book.

The author is really into his VW Kombi vans, and a lot of the pages are devoted to those Volkswagen vehicles. The back pages of the book have Hot Wheels' top 40 castings, which is basically the author's opinion on the best car brought out by Hot Wheels each year of the company's existence.

It's not a bad read and an enjoyable way to relive the past. Unfortunately a fair few photos make multiple appearances in here though, surely the editors could have stepped in and said hey, how about covering a bit more of the range.

I purchased this book for my 6 1/2 year old son who is Hot Wheels crazy. He looked at all of the pictures and then put it away. It's really for the collector and Dad who played with the cars in the 70's. For them, it's a great book to have around.

The book is made of very good quality material, and well organized in terms of text and pictures. It's a very nice reference, especially for those customers that are looking for to known how the history of Hot Wheels developed along of the 40 years of sucess. Some experienced collectors, that already have contact with this brand for a long time can miss some information about some of the icons from Hot Wheels, but for sure, those interested to learn about the marketing strategy used by Mattel to promote this cars during 40 years will like to read the book.