![]() He has gotten a lot of his best items by tracking down former Hot Wheels employees and asking them if they have anything they’d like to sell, he said. “And they’re worth, with the exception of one casting, most of them were worth at least $15,000 to $20,000 and going up.” ![]() “They’re absolutely stunning, exceedingly rare,” said Pascal. They were specially made to look extra nice in TV commercials in 1968, he said. Pascal’s collection, which numbers in the thousands, includes a number of Hot Wheels cars that were made with extra-shiny paint. “That rear loader Volkswagen Beach Bomb, for collectors, it’s sort of like the Ferrari 250 GTO for real car collectors,” she said.įerrari 250 GTOs from the 1960s have sold for as much as $70 million and they are generally recognized as among the word’s most valuable automobiles. She is also an avid Hot Wheels collector. To consider the relative value of a car like this it helps to consider the relative values of other collectible items like real cars, said Mary Brisson, a catalog production manager at the classic car auction company Gooding & Co. He and the seller had agreed to keep the price secret, he said.īruce Pascal, a commercial real estate executive, in his home office in Maryland. The sale ultimately fell through so Pascal contacted the owner and bought the car for more than $50,000, he said. Pascal bought the pink Beach Bomb after seeing newspaper articles in 1999 about the car selling for $72,000. All are worth at least $25,000 apiece, he said. Pascal’s pink one is one of four so-called rear-loader Beach Bomb prototypes he owns. Pascal said he has no plans to ever sell his.Īnother Beach Bomb prototype, a red one, was appraised on an episode of PBS’s Antiques Roadshow in 2016 and found to be worth between $100,000 and $150,000. There is one other pink one, but that has the original lighter bottomed design. Pascal’s Beach Bomb is the only pink one with the heavier weighted bottom, he said. The version that was sold to the public in 1969 was wider and had the surfboards on the side. Ultimately, Hot Wheels designers went back to the drawing board and completely redesigned the model. About 144 prototypes of this particular model were made and only about 50 are known to survive today, said Pascal. Some prototypes were made with heavier bottoms to try to overcome that tipping problem. But when it was blasted out of the Hot Wheels Super-Charger – a miniature garage with spinning rubber discs that slung the cars out at high speeds – the tall, narrow bus flipped over. They were supposed to go fast and whip around that little orange plastic track. The whole point of Hot Wheels was that they weren’t supposed to just look cool. It looked great, but the bus had serious handling issues. Hot Wheels’ original version of the Beach Bomb had lifelike proportions scaled down to 1/64 size and tiny surfboards sticking out the back window. For 1969, Hot Wheels’ second year on the market, designers wanted to include a California-style model of the famous Volkswagen bus. That $150,000 model, for instance, was a failed experiment. ![]() This Hot Wheels Volkswagen prototype toy is worth an estimated $150,000. They’re mostly prototypes that were never intended for a life outside of Mattel’s corporate offices. Auctioneers of Rhode Island.Īlthough he hasn’t inspected the car himself, Landry said that Pascal’s toy is easily worth $100,000 but probably more, especially as values for all sorts of collectibles have risen in recent months.īefore you start digging around in your closet to find that old vinyl carrying case full of Hot Wheels from when you were a kid, you should know that Pascal’s most valuable models – many of them worth thousands of dollars – were never sold in stores. “When it comes to any field of collecting, there’s always that pinnacle ‘Holy Grail’ item where it’s just that the supply that’s out there can no way meet the demand and that causes the price to go through the roof,” said Travis Landry, an appraiser with Bruneau & Co. Pascal, a Washington DC-area commercial real estate executive, is the owner of what is believed to be the most valuable Hot Wheels car in the world: a 1969 version of the “Beach Bomb” Volkswagen bus estimated to be worth as much as $150,000.Ĭollectibles experts say the appraisal of the tiny car is entirely believable based on its extreme rarity and its nearly perfect condition. But for Bruce Pascal, a nearly lifelong obsession with the tiny cars has turned into a collection of mind-boggling value. ![]() ![]() You can buy most Hot Wheels cars for about a dollar at Target, Wal-Mart or pretty much any local drugstore. ![]()
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