Hot Wheels: From 0 to 50 at 1:64 Scale Hardcover – 6 Sept. 2018

Although my son asked for this he didn’t realise it was available. He started reading it almost immediately and was very pleased with it. It was a book inside a plastic case from what I remember.

This book started out as just a rah-rah corporate history that pointed out that Elliot Handler, (the "el" in "Mattel"), and his wife Ruth were hard driven visionaries who changed the world of small scale automobile toys. That was O.K.; I like success stories built on vision and grit, but I wasn't up for a whole, repetitive book about Elliot and Ruth.But wait. About a fifth of the way in we start talking about actual Hot Wheels, and the story is fascinating. The idea is that no other car at the time, (Corgi, Matchbox, etc.), was "fast". The wheels on those cars just let you push the toy around; the cars were designed mostly for looks. Elliot Handler had the idea to make his wheels "hot" and his cars fast, and that changed everything. But get this. You know how they made that happen? For axles they tried some high quality thin diameter mandolin wire that was left over from a failed toy project and was too expensive to have been thrown away. They used space age DuPont plastic coatings to make the wheels frictionless on the axles. And they reengineered the wheels/tires to just barely touch the tracks. And voila! a new type of toy car was born. And suddenly this book got interesting.We move on to the first issue of models, the so-called Sweet Sixteen, and tie that to a brief but punchy review of where car culture, customizing, and hot-rodding was in 1968. There's an interesting chapter on how modeling has changed from graph paper and 3x models to computer assisted and 3-D design. And the fact that the first Hot Wheels racetrack was a length of weather stripping purchased at a hardware store adds some romance to the whole affair.After all of that we move to manufacturing and packaging and the like. That's all interesting if you like things like tours of real manufacturing plants, (try the Harley-Davidson plant in York, Pennsylvania), but it's at this point that I gave up any idea that this would be a good gift for one of my grandkids. These are, after all, products that are designed, manufactured, and sold; when viewed in that light, (and maybe also from a collector's perspective), this book is very interesting. And there are a few short time line graphics that show some different models and different accessories and different licensed products, and offer some collecting tips and stories. But, as a complement to actually playing with Hot Wheels as a current real kid, I don't see this as an option.So, this book is a bit of a "50th Anniversary" fluff piece, but it has enough aha! moments and enough engaging detail and enough civil and manufacturing engineering that I thought the whole project was sort of neat. It was a fun find.(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Livro que aborda a história da Mattel, a criação da linha Hotwheels e sua trajetória do fim dos anos 60 até à atualidade.

Interesantes datos de la historia de HW

Hotwheel obsessed son adores it. He is fascinated by the cars and loves reading about the history.

I am/have been a Hot Wheels collector for 31 years. This was a must have book for me. I have met Larry wood so his intro is special to me. Its a great book with tons of insight. If you are an HW fan, this is the book for you!

Great book