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Nightburnerz, Part 1: 2025's greatest HW five-pack

The 2025 selection of five-packs has been pretty dominated by the F1s, but early in the year I heard a lot about this set:

The Nightburnerz set comprises 4 licenced and one fantasy car, and where (if you're like me) most five-packs contain one or two cars you'd probably get if they were by themselves, but you don't want to pay for the others to get them, in this case every one of these is great.  I still had a little pause - but then I saw that 5-packs were reduced to £7.20!  Given they usually go for £11 and a mainline for £2.40, that's a pretty damn good price. I was never going to get the F1 set, I'm not a fan, and the Mattel anniversary one is not for me either, so this is the one for me. It's only my second five-pack ever, and with the single cars I got at the same time, it pushes my collection over the 1000 car mark! 1007 cars by my tally, and still going...

Going in order from top to bottom of the pack, first is the Sierra.  The casting, a Ryu Asada design, represents itself on the bottom as an "'87 Ford Sierra Cosworth", which is part but not all of the story - It should read Ford Sierra RS Cosworth.  Also, the year 1987, lower ducktail spoiler below the whale-tail and central indent to the front bumper for an extra inlet slot below the grille indicates that this is the RS500 version, a limited edition of 500 RHD cars constructed for Ford and Cosworth by Aston Martin and sold in the UK only.  The Sierra was Euro Ford's main large saloon car, its hot boi configuration was known as the XR4i (alongside the Escort XR3i and Fiesta XR2i); the RS Cosworth was a hotter version with a 2.0l turbo engine based on a Ford Pinto, and the RS500 an even hotter one, with numerous engine tweaks to make it raceable.  Americans might have occasionally seen the Merkur XR4Ti on their roads and racetracks a bit earlier in the decade, a relatively unsuccessful and unusual attempt to sell a Euro Ford in the USA by beefing up and for some reason rebranding the Sierra XR4i ('Merkur' is German for Mercury), and the RS Cosworth adopted many of the components developed for the XR4Ti as well.

The RS500 was created for dominating Group A racing, which it succeeded at in touring car racing all over the world, although it was less good at rally, inevitably losing out to 4WD cars on loose surfaces; there was an XR4x4 but it did not use the powerful Cosworth engine.  This one has Advan-style gradient stripes (my favourite flavour of racing decoration) of Ford-badge blue that look amazing, and the white Aerodisc wheels are a grand choice.

I have the first release of this car (debut releases are one of my focuses with collecting, since I think of my collection as being focused on design and each car as a piece of commercial art more than a toy, and the first release most reflects the original designers' visions for the car), which is a nice pastiche of a Texaco livery worn by a successful 1987 racer - and the Matchbox Superkings one I had as a kid - and skipped the rest of the releases. They were cool, but not that cool.  I missed the white premium version with restrained and tasteful Ford racing stripes that was in the Canyon Warriors series.  That was very cool looking and if I'd seen that at a sensible price I'd have snapped it up, but in all honesty this might be even better.

Next is the Maxima.  This is a Nissan Maxima G910 estate from around 1983, modified for drifting with the rear bumper deleted, a window cut in the bonnet and a big, aggressive splitter.  It's a really great casting that injects a ton of personality into an otherwise mundane everyday vehicle, like a budget DIY response to an Audi RS2 Avant, all early '80s angles and flat body panels with lovely bolt-on box flaring.

It's a car for real car people, who understand every car is special to its owner and holds the potential for greatness within itself, that projects like this are about perceiving that potential and actualising it; the kind of car that makes you wish HW would do something like this this with your old family car, or an old beater you have long parted ways with.  I found a Speedhunters article here featuring a similar but less drifty car, with an RB25 engine swapped in, but I don't think there's an exact real-world counterpart to this car.  A weird thing I just realised about this car, though: what's going on with the back doors?  Has the rear box flare really sealed them shut?

For customisers it's a fun car to work on with the transparent bonnet allowing for engine detailing you'd not normally get a chance to appreciate, and this one has a chromed interior piece that will enhance the look of the engine a lot (I've not opened this yet, but I probably will).  I have the first release of this car also; in fact I have two of them, because this car saw the debut of the awesome FC3 wheel, modelled after the Advan SA3R wheel, one of my favourite wheel designs (and featuring on the Gentileschi Delta in Deliverance Book 3 ).  I wanted a set for customs, so I bought it again; the later releases featured a shakotan-style livery that didn’t appeal to me, and while the one in the Greddy diorama was the highlight of the set in my view, I wasn't really into the rest, so this grey/blue metallic one with "Hotto Hoiiru" on the side in Japanese is my third, but only the second design.

Next is the car that provides the artwork for the box, the Supra.  This is a car with too many names: a 2020 Toyota GR Supra A90 (a.k.a. J29/DB, a.k.a. 5th generation) that wears a Pandem (a.k.a. Rocket Bunny) version 1 body kit. There's no mention of this kit on the car itself, but the kit is easily recognisable, flaring its wheel arches out even wider than normal and adding a wide wing to the back. Compared to the standard body version, this car has been released many times.  This Ryu Asada-designed casting is one I don't have the debut version of, as I found it rather dull, but I got the one from the Slide Street premium series which had more personality, and later on a whim I got the red A80 and A90 Then and Now pair from 2022. 

The contours are very appealing on this car, especially the broad hips at the rear, and I've always admired how the car evokes the 2000GT as well as the A80 Supra, even though I don't really feel that passionate about this car.  This version is a really lustrous, sensual metalflake red that has a little iridescence to it, changing shade with angle, and suits a curvy body like this perfectly.  Some black swooshes on the sides get a Supra logotype in that strange ugly Supra font that looks like a very old man's handwriting and GR badges (the decisions behind Toyota's branding are a total mystery to me, what was wrong with TRD?). A tan interior peeps from inside. This is almost a sexy car, and I don't often say that, I don't find cars and sex crossing over very naturally, but this and its flowing curves is the colour of spectacular femme fatale lips or racy satin lingerie.  I think it's my new favourite A90. I still don't adore the A90, but I appreciate it fondly, and I'll defend it all day against the morons who moan because BMW worked with Toyota on the car and supply a lot of the parts - like BMW is bad at making performance cars all of a sudden? Anyway, newsflash, all cars are built with parts bought from suppliers, a lot of whom supply parts to multiple manufacturers. No Toyota is purely a Toyota, they buy components from dozens, maybe hundreds of firms. It's always been this way - or did you think Daimler forged all his own nuts and bolts?

Number four is maybe my favourite car of the bunch, the one and only fantasy car of the pack, the Dimachinni Veloce.  Named for its designer Dmitriy Shakhmatov, a man who enjoys naming cars after himself, it's a car that naturally belongs in a group with the El Segundo Coupe and Glory Chaser, as an extremely credible pastiche of a European sports car racer, in this case a '70s Italianate wedge with British hints.  HW have just about perfected the art of the Muscle Car pastiche, but in recent years as their Euro and Japanese selection has grown, so too has their ability to use the design languages of these types of cars. The Dimachinni Veloce evokes Maserati Bora or Khamsin and De Tomaso Mangusta to me, a bit of Lamborghini Espada and maybe a pinch of Lancia 037 too, but seen alongside the Alfa Romeo GTV6 3.0 it bears a striking resemblance to that too, if one were to flatten the Alfa a bit (credit to Joe Eldridge of Ignition Diecast for this insight - his Yuuchoobe channel is a daily visit for me, an always interesting and entertaining place for collectors of little toy cars and a great exercise in zero-prep, zero-pretention, just-sit-down-and-speak-your-mind videos like Youtube was always supposed to be, and he has an epic archiving project happening too, collecting all the main line Hot Wheels since 1968 and showing each as he adds it to the archive).

And then there's hints of Lotus Elite or Aston Martin V8 sneaking in too.  The rear view is particularly interesting with the intensely Khamsin-esque glass across the entire back of the car (compare below with my Kyosho Khamsin, a car I still can't believe I found in a Junk shop in 上田市), spare wheel and louvred window.  The front meanwhile has the bonnet (complete with GTV6 3.0-like bulge) formed from the interior piece for colour contrast, which is especially striking here since it's chrome.  The black with gold detail is a minor theme among this year's main line releases, with the BMW 6 series, Bentley Continental GT3 and Lamborghini Miura, and looks no less gorgeous than any of them.

This type of car is why Hot Wheels appeals to me, though - it's marvellous to behold the level of design ability that sees to the heart of an existing car design, can draw out features that can evoke those designs without copying them, and then integrates them into fictional designs that are credible enough that they can easily be mistaken for real cars, and do it with such verve and authoritative confidence.  Shakhmatov also designed the Maxima, and many other great castings but this is probably my favourite, and apparently was most recently in charge of premium castings, but left Mattel in 2023.

My only other one of these is again a first version, a blue rally version.  I never encountered the green Alitalia-looking version from 2023 but it's on the list, near the top.

Lastly from this pack, there's the Subaru.  This Subaru Impreza GR WRX STI is a 2011 model, the last year that WRX was a version of the Impreza - the WRX became a separate model from 2012 onwards.  GR in this case is indicating a widebody hatchback, the only available body for the STI that year. It's hard to ascertain since there are a great many special editions and so on of the Impreza, but this could be the second Cosworth in this pack.  A Cosworth-tuned Impreza called the CS400 was made in a limited edition of 75 only, and to this day remains the hottest over-the-counter Subaru out there (there must be 1000-hp Subarus out there at this point, though those will all be homebrewed).

I was very unsure about the pink when I saw photos, I think pink cars are hard to do well without getting unnecessarily camp or tacky very quickly, but in person it's a lovely rich shade, warm and floral despite the metallic zing.  A Subaru is a atural choice for pink, though, since the STI logotype is pink.

In the end my qualms about the colour match with the trajectory of my feeling about the car itself, though; I was never a fan of the Impreza hatchback and originally intended to skip this casting, preferring to stick to saloon-bodied Imprezas, but in fact this pink one is my 5th Subaru hatchback. I unexpectedly received the yellow 2021 one as a freebie in a package of other cars from a seller on Mercari when I lived in Japan.  I was delighted by this kind gesture and the car became a fond favourite, eventually getting rubber wheels, a roof sunburst tampo and a sticker-bomb tampo on the front bumper, an interior swap and even a cameo in Deliverance book 3, and getting me into hatchback Imprezas generally.  Later I built this red 2022 lifted one with oversized wheels (filing the wheel arches was a nightmare, it still doesn't roll freely, but I'm still proud of this, isn't it neat?), and bought the beautiful metalflake navy colour variant.  The fifth, the black one, is part of the 2019 Backroad Rally set, a collection I as a rally car lover felt obliged to get all of.

That's all from this five pack, and from part 1, but not all from the Nightburnerz series. In part 2 I'll think a bit more about what 'Nightburnerz' actually means...

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Recently I wrote about the new Bertone-designed Lancia Stratos Zero, a legendary concept car I'd wanted to see in diecast form for most of my life, and I got to thinking. Long ago I had a Corgi model of the Alfa Romeo Carabo, another extremely influential Bertone concept car… if that existed, what other famed concept cars of that era had been released? Quite a few, it seems:

So I went to ebay, and found what I could that was affordable and not too destroyed. In order to keep it affordable and available, it's all a bit played with, but mostly in OK condition, easily enough to get a feel for these cars. We'll start with the Carabo. This car has the distinction of being the first ever to feature scissor doors, predating the Countach which Marcello Gandini at Bertone also designed and reused the concept on, but thanks to the attention it got it also basically introduced the idea of the 'wedge car'. Prior to this, the high-end sports car had been curvy and sensuous, and the mechanical, angular, louvre-happy look was a new direction entirely, and caused a sensation in 1968 when it was first shown, in metallic green; even today it looks much more recent than 1968, and I've seen it used on the cover of more than one Synthwave album where it fits right in. While not intended for production, only as a styling exercise, it was built on an Alfa Romeo P33 chassis and like most of the concepts of the time was a fully functional, viably roadworthy car. So much of this design went on to influence what supercars looked like, it's a really vital design to know in the evolution of car design.

This model was part of a Corgi series called Rockets, which came with a 'tune up key' that you could insert in the base and twist to pop off the chassis, which allowed me to use a small flat-head screwdriver to do the same and swap out the typically nasty Corgi wheels for some HW ones, which look a lot better, without all the usual hassle of drilling out the rivets (this is often particularly annoying on Corgis as they frequently use domed rivets that are a nightmare to centre a drill bit on). The chrome green and grey lower section look great, and quite closely resemble the real car, which is named for Carabidae beetles which have very shiny green carapaces with orange parts.

Another Corgi Rocket model that popped up when I searched was the Bizzarini Manta. Bizzarini is a lesser-known Italian carmaker, and most of what they made was sports racers (Matchbox made a beautiful Moving Parts Bizzarini 5300 racer recently which I'm hoping to get sometime), but in 1969 they hired the then-new Italdesign studio, headed by legendary designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, to create the Manta. It has a 3-seat cabin with the driver in the centre, pre-empting McLaren's use of this idea in the F1 by nearly 30 years, features a unique venetian blind-like front thingy that can be opened for better city driving visibility and closed for high speed driving, and was built on a retired P538 Le Mans racer chassis, with a 5.3L Chevrolet V8 in the back, forward of the rear axle. The design was the first 'one-box' GT car, with engine, passengers and (in this case entirely theoretical) luggage sharing a single volume, cemented the future of Giugiaro and the Italdesign studio, and like the Carabo still looks futuristic and hard to locate in time.

The real car was briefly silver but quickly got a bright turquoise gloss repaint - the Corgi version is metallic and a lot darker, but still looks good. This one had even worse wheels than the Carabo, and worse, had oversize ones that gave it oversized arches, which in turn made it hard to find appropriate replacement wheels - these are from a Majorette, I'm not that into them and may well replace them later - but they are an improvement on the train-like originals, trust me.

Having found a legendary Bertone and a legendary ItalDesign, I then set out to find a legendary Pininfarina, and to my shock, succeeded. For a long time the Pininfarina design agency were the only ones used by Ferrari, and in common with many, they often used retired racing cars as the cores of designs they relied on to showcase design talent and thus drum up business, and that's the origin of the Ferrari 512 S Modulo. Pininfarina and Bertone were rivals, and in 1970 when Bertone showed the extreme, space-age Stratos Zero, the Modulo was Pininfarina's answer. Where the Stratos Zero evoked the technology of spaceflight, the Modulo evoked the technology of science fiction, arguably even more ludicrously extreme with its sliding canopy, cutaways for the tops of the wheels and mirrored top and bottom shells complete with false windows on the lower sides. The panels to the rear of the side windows were retractable cooling ducts for the engine bay, much like the 'bat wings' on the Lamborghini Murcielago.

I'm really happy to have a model of the Modulo, but it comes with a twinge of disappointment - it's frankly kind of goofy. Every photo I've ever seen of the Modulo is a low-angle shot that makes the most of its flying saucer-esque profile, and these do not reveal quite how much the car looks like a bar of half-used soap from a higher angle, but holding a diecast of it does; its rounded corners and straight sides just aren't quite as attractive in three dimensions, and allegedly the car was so low-slung that it was hard to see out. While it was a fully running car, it seems clear that the Modulo was made focusing on styling ideas over usability.

Corgi came through again with this yellow version which has somehow retained its original sticker representing the car's rear window with engine cooling holes. Even though the car was originally black and is most often pictured in its later white colour scheme, the yellow works too, at least now that I've added the black panels. A kit car version was featured in the often overlooked but surprisingly good early Tommy Lee Jones movie Black Moon.

Returning to Bertone and staying with Corgi, there's also this 1969 Autobianchi A112 Runabout Barchetta (misspelled on the base as "barghetta") by Marcello Gandini. Barchetta is an Italian word for a small boat that is sometimes applied to open cars without glass, but in this case it was particularly apt: it's inspired by racing powerboats of the time and at early stages of the design, this car was intended to be amphibious, leading to the open, doorless form, the high rear-mounted headlights and high ground clearance, but this idea was later dropped. It was based on the chassis of the popular Autobianchi A112 supermini, and shared the tiny car's 1.1L inline 4, so was in a different class from most of the others here, but like the Modulo was mostly intended to showcase ideas. The production Fiat X1/9 was ultimately based on this car's design, and elements, particularly the form of the front wheel arches and the spoiler, were used on the production Lancia Stratos. I wouldn't call it a lovely car, but it looks fun for living a life in warm, beachy climes.

This casting was apparently recycled as a Wonder Woman car at some point, and is often found with a WW sticker on the front. It was also cast by Matchbox, and there seems to be a 1:32ish Corgi version too. I must admit to being confused as to why this car in particular was so widely produced. But it must have its fans, as Bertone recently made a modernised version.

Another Bertone, but Matchbox this time: the Lamborghini Marzal from 1967. Designed as a four-seater using a 2.0L straight six that was basically one side of a standard Lamborghini 4.0L V12, Bertone aimed to complement the grand tourers Lamborghini made, but it was not really a serious try at a production model so much as a piece of promotional art that was aimed at shocking the motoring press into giving Lamborghini attention at a fraction of the price of advertising. That said, it also formed the basis for the later design of the more conventional but still Lamborghini-weird Espada. In the Marzal's case the whole car is based on a hexagon motif, an idea that later worked out well for the Countach too, and is almost entirely glassed-in (this model has a metal roof, assumedly for stiffness, but the real car's roof was fully glass), necessitating a full air-con system. Its gullwing doors skip the b-pillar entirely and run the length of the silver-upholstered cabin, and the hexagon-shaped louvres on the back are particularly distinctive. It first appeared at the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix, driven by Prince Ranier III and his wife Princess Grace, best known as Grace Kelly; the suspension was still a work in progress at the time, so the car did a parade lap of the circuit with an anvil in the boot to level the car.

Matchbox made this model way back in the day, choosing crimson instead of the more conservative silver the car was debuted in, or the white it later wore. Like a number of '70s castings, it was also reissued in a variety of colours (including this green) in the form of a Super GT, Matchbox's late '80s budget line, with further reduced window area, full-black windows that hide its lack of interior and all hint of what it really was scrubbed from the base, presumably to evade copyright issues.

The last thing in this group is a bit of an outlier: the Nissan 126X concept from 1970. Relatively speaking I know a lot less about this, but it's another piece of the strategy Japan's carmakers used to signify the country's industrial maturation in the eyes of the world. The Toyota 2000GT had launched to wide acclaim a few years before, Nissans were beating Porsches in races, and at the Tokyo motor show of 1970 many marques including Toyota, Mazda and Nissan addressed the matter of forward-thinking design. Toyota showed the EX-7, Mazda debuted the RX500 and Nissan this, a 4-seat gullwing wedge with a rear-mid straight six mounted sideways and driving all four wheels - or at least that's the idea, as I'm not sure this was actually a functioning prototype. This was nonetheless kitted out with a steering yoke rather than a wheel but the most interesting and innovative feature was a series of coloured lights up the front of the car intended to signal to other motorists what the car was doing, with red for braking, yellow for constant speed and green for acceleration. I don't honestly love this car, but of all of them it might be the only one that tries not only to look futuristic and showcase design, but also evolve how people drive.

Nissan was exporting under the Datsun brand at the time, which I assume is why Matchbox seem to have named it Datsun 126X despite the Nissan text visible on the rear quarter in period shots of the car. Rather than the pleasing lightly metallic blue-grey two-tone of the show car, Matchbox in their infinite wisdom seem to have opted for a yellow over orange two-tone with amber glass, which looks surprisingly all right but is not a patch on the much classier original colour scheme. This has also been released with flame stickers on the yellow and, like the Marzal, in various colours as a Super GT.

All these weird and wonderful designs are one-off show pieces that have only one true job: to inspire. These are quite literally imagination made concrete and tangible and sharable, and the supercar concepts of the late '60s and early '70s are in my view what make this era the golden age of the concept car. It's cars like these more than any that gave me the enthusiasm I have for car design and which inform how I look at all cars, but especially rarities I'll very rarely if ever even see, let alone have a chance to drive. In some cases, finding diecasts was my introduction to the existence of quite a lot of cars, and it felt to young me like admission to a secret hidden area of car knowledge; the Carabo I remember reading about but, in the pre-internet wasteland of the '80s, I had no idea what it looked like until the Corgi fell into my lap. This bunch right here are the root of why I collect diecasts and write this blog, and there are more to find! Sometimes people write these types of car off as pointless, but to me they are an absolute necessity if you want a healthy car industry that makes people want to buy cars. These cars are made to move you in a less conventional way, and that's why these worn old toys from before I was even born are some of my very favourites.

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I'm delighted that I got this new Matchbox Morgan Plus Four.

I adore Morgans; always have. While they are less than practical in most cases, they tick every other box for me. Let's explore what Morgans are and why I love them.

Morgan is a British company - which is still fully true to my knowledge, because in this ridiculous world we currently occupy, there are degrees to this sort of statement. MG was a British company, got acquired by a Chinese consortium and, with its cars built in China, is in no sense beyond the historical a British company; Land Rover still build its cars in the UK but it's owned by Tata of India. Are Land Rover still British? I'd say yes, but it's arguable. But Morgan is owned partly by the family of founder Henry Morgan (along with a private equity group, because you can't fucking escape the bullshit of 2025) and operate from Malvern in Worcestershire (pronounced "WOOstersheer"), as it has since 1909. This is crucial in understanding what Morgan is about; the company is a small-volume producer, because they still build all their cars by hand.

No robots, no mass-production. Every single one is bespoke, uniquely built to the customer's specifications, and as someone with an incessant urge to customise everything this is an extremely appealing attribute. It's hard to overstate how much I like the idea of a coachbuilt car made by craftspeople with decades of experience, but with modern technology and reliability. They have three models presently, the Plus Four, the Supersport and the Super 3 (recently made by Hot Wheels). Past models included the 4/4 with 4 seats, the +8 with a V8 and the Aero, which was an enclosed and streamlined model, along with a whole tine of 3-wheelers.

They are largely aluminium in construction, with a wooden subframe, which makes them very light. Of course, the look is iconic and dates back to around 1936, revised a little in 1950 and not much since, although it's often tweaked and given modernised tech. Morgan don't make their own engines, and the current range use BMW inline engines for the 4-wheelers (a 2-litre B48B20O1 turbo i4 making 255 hp for the Plus Four, and a 335hp B58B30C i6 with a twin-scroll turbo for the Supersport) and a Ford 3-cylinder for the 3-wheeler Super 3. Past models have used Ford, Mazda and Rover engines

They're all RWD, with auto or manual options that hit 60 in about 5 seconds in the Plus Four, and a sub 4-second 60 via auto only in the Supersport. What results is a sports car in the classic sense that Mazda was aiming for with the MX-5, not brutally powerful or transcendently fast but small, low, responsive, agile and focused on being fun to drive. They have only the space behind the seats for cargo, plus an optional rack on the back, and while third-party rigid hardtops exist there's no factory option, so they'd be pretty hard to live with as primary everyday cars, but as a car for enjoying driving, and as drivable art, I think there's probably none better.

Notably with this, it's basically exactly the same size as the 1:55 Siku +8, which is odd, as the little figures are supposed to be 1:75 scale but seem pretty well fitted to the car. The Super 3 is a bit larger scale, while the Majorette (the more battered green one, which has HW real riders but is very much not a HW model) is a touch longer. The inability of diecast makers to stick to a single scale drives me up the wall.

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I've had a good week for diecast acquisitions, bringing forth a rainbow of neat stuff and a rare chance to take a few shots outside:

I discovered some cars from the G case for the first time, including the badass Kia EV6 custom. I had already decided to grab one of these on the grounds of not having enough Korean cars, the nice colour and itasha (or Korean equivalent; on which note, as best I can tell the word 귀여운 apparently means 'cuteness' and is pronounced 'gwiyomi') livery, but the real treat here is the significantly more custom bodywork than I had originally realised. Not only does the car boast widebody flared arches and an aggressive ducktail spoiler, the front chin spoiler forms an unbroken ramp up behind the 'grille' much as you might find on racing supercars like the Ferrari 488 Pista, and continues at the same angle with barely a crease up to the roofline, and the rear window tapers inside the car's bodywork much as seen on the Ford Supervan IV (the quest for peace) and VW T3 custom. Inside, the car has a central driver's seat as you'd find in a McLaren F1 and all other seats are eliminated. Whatever your attitude to electric cars, the degree of customisation deserves all respect.

Another purple addition to the collection from the G assortment is this much more conventional 1968 Dodge Dart, with no more specific name given, but the hood scoop and stance implies this is a Dart Hemi with a 7-litre engine, built y Hurst for drag competition. The visuals are superb with fantastic striping fully appropriate to the era. I've seen the Dart many times but never found one I really liked until now. Everything here is exactly as I'd expect for a drag-spec muscle car except one thing: it's part of the 2025 'Compact Kings' series. This being a compact car makes absolutely no sense to me - but then I am a European and how Americans classify their cars has always totally confused me, so I might as well admit defeat. Sure, it's a compact car. 'Compact' is about interior volume, not, like, how big the whole car is. Whatever.

From that same series comes this, the 1976 Chevrolet Chevette. While the Dart seems likely to be a drag spec car, this is undeniably one, as attested by the NHRA livery and wheelie bar. I'm not that into drag racing but I do love a hot hatchback, and besides, it's based on the T-car platform that in the UK became the Vauxhall Chevette, one of the earliest British-built hatchbacks, and a car that was still on the roads when I was a kid learning how to spot cars. Its shovel nose was an easy tell in traffic. I still remember the weird feeling of realising 'Chevette' was a name that had to have come from Chevrolet rather than Vauxhall, and that the GM badge really did mean it was at least sort of American, just like Ford was sort of American, even if they were built here and not sold over there. Understanding global markets is tough when you've barely started school.

There was a Matchbox restock too, and I was able to finally come across something I was annoyed to miss the first time: the Radical Motorsports SR3 XXR. This is a fabulous roofless track car that seems designed to be a baby Ferrari 333 SP. Rather than the Ferrari's V12, Radical generally kits their cars out with a 1.5 litre Suzuki GSX-R inline-4 from the Hayabusa sport bike, reworked by Radical's own performance engines subsidiary, making 232hp in a car weighing 720kg. They even make a street-legal version. They run in one-make racing series all over the world and Radical have made over 1100 of them; this car feels like discovering a cool secret.

Another Matchbox I was overjoyed to find was the 1970 Citroen 2CV, often known as the "deux cheveaux" (a word which, as a kid, I was convinced was spelled "dershavoh" based on how it sounds). This is one of those diminutive, cheap, simple 'people's cars' that just make you smile. They are all dreadful boneshakers by any modern standard, but the Beetle, the Cinquecento, the Mini, the Isetta, the Maluch, the Subaru 360 all have the same quality of chunky, squat, vaguely comical dumpiness of proportion that makes them silly for everyone and therefore demeaning to no-one. We all lack dignity extracting ourselves from one of these things; they are great levellers. The snail-like 2CV in this case is maybe doing double duty; I believe it may be a stealth Bond Car, the most well-known appearance of a yellow 2CV being in the semi-comical but no less awesome for it chase scene in For Your Eyes Only. Best Roger Moore Bond film, no question.

Matchboxes are 3 for 2 in Tesco, so for the third I grabbed a curious but not unfamiliar model, the Coast 2 Coast. I don't know much about boats but the detail touches on this model appeal to me, with a set of scuba gear on the swim deck and a coiled rope in the bow as well as cast propellors underneath. Given the recent throwback fantasy castings coming out of Mattel, like the Rapid Pulse and Slide-Burn from HW that resemble Matchbox fantasy models of the 70s and the return of the fantasy MBX Field Car as both an enclosed and this year also open-top, a rework of another 70s Matchbox, I wonder if this is a modernised call back to the old Police Launch. It's an extremely coherent design and I'll be surprised if I don't get more of them in future.

Meanwhile, in the German supermarket quarter, Aldi continues to have an excellent HW restocking policy. They had got a B case in shortly before I got there, so the R32 Skyline that appears in the background of Han's funeral in Fast & Furious 7 hadn't been plucked. I have a few R32s but I do like to have iconic versions of cars where possible. The road car was usually promoted in a dark grey metallic finish, and while I did plan to buy the Tomica Premium version eventually, events conspired to shut that door for me before 'eventually' arrived. This is a very attractive and understated rendition of this car and the metalflake paint is a lot nicer than plain gloss. Mind you, for all I prefer the car to the R33 or R34, I think I'm done for R32s, though; a reasonably-priced Advan Team Transport (together with the truck) or an exceptional new colour scheme is about all that I would really consider at this point.

Across the car park from Aldi is Lidl, which on my first visit had no diecasts at all, but last time in addition to a quick raid on the bakery I stumbled on a basket of 2024 D case Hot Wheels, a box that seemed to completely evade Tesco, Poundland, Home Bargains and all the local dedicated toyshops alike. From it, this week I plucked the 2010 Chevy Camaro SS in acid green, one of a number of HW concept cars that have transitioned to become emergency vehicles once their novelty fades and part of the 'first response' series. This phrase, near-exclusive to American English and therefore exotic in its unfamiliarity, is intriguing to me since it covers a huge variety of types of emergency personnel: cops, medics and firefighters, certainly, but also dogcatchers, coastguards, biohazard cleanup guys, community nurses, plumbers…and with the 'RESPONSE TEAM' graphics, this tough, fast and undeniably cool emergency vehicle gives no clues as to who would drive it or what response their team will bring.

Finally, the Hot Wheels universe has been going bonkers for the Silhouettes premium series. Needless to say, the one shop I can easily reach that has any premiums has seen no sign of these, and is still clogged with Exotic Envy Aston Martin V12 Speedsters nobody wants - but in a rare flash of sense, Amazon had some in stock. Not the RWB, of course, or the Nissans, or even the Mazda, but the McLaren. The McLaren 720S with Liberty Walk LB-Works body kit may be in the shadow of the RWB and Liberty Walk R34 skyline in its debut, but unlike both of them, it's a fantastic colour. HW metallic teal is one of my favourite colours for cars, and as soon as I saw pics of this series I knew I'd be focusing on the McLaren. Most McLarens don't move me particularly and I don't have any other 720s, but the bolt-on widebody and silly wing bring much-needed personality to what I've always considered an anodyne and forgettable blob of a car. The complicated contours show off the shine of the paint, and without a coloured livery to portray, the dodgy inkjet-looking tampos that plague recent HW premiums aren't an issue, as I expect they are with the R34 and Mazda. As a result I find myself revising my opinion on the 720S while I gaze at the sparking turquoise thing on the desk and catch myself enjoying design I'd previously rejected. It's nice finding new stuff to enjoy.

That said, though, the Silhouettes series is a mess and I'm surprised people are so into it. I will admit on paper this is a great roster, but the actual designs are for the most part a big letdown. The RWB is a basic-ass colour (so many people have called it 'clean', but if that's you, I have news you won't like: there's a high risk you have boring taste), the R34 has a deco that's already been done twice (and pretty badly on the R35), the 300ZX is an uninteresting and rather half-hearted pastiche of the Calsonic livery and the Mazda is just fugly, licenced livery though it may be. The scalpers can fight over them.

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The Bertone styling house is probably the most influential in creating what a 'supercar' looks like. The late '60s and early '70s was the golden era of the wedge-shaped one-of-one concept car and one of the pinnacles of the paradigm, in my view, is this: Marcello Gandini's space-age concept, the Lancia Stratos HF Zero, named to evoke the edge of the stratosphere, the border of space.

This is the very extreme of car design, way beyond utility and into art. When it was first shown, this car was a metalflake copper orange, and was intended to appear carved from a single block of bronze (note the lack of panel seams visible anywhere) but was later resprayed silver. This car is, it must be acknowledged, ludicrous; it's actually hard to fully take in without comparing it to known things like people or other cars because its form is so different. Here are some charming period shots of the car alongside a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and an apparent cowgirl aviator who's just finished her bombing run and is keen to get home in her Stratos Zero:

The Ford GT40 is so named because it's only 40 inches tall, a fact that clearly made a big impression for that to be the origin of it's name; the Stratos Zero is 33.3 inches tall, due to the remit given to Gandini being to make the lowest possible car, and the occupants (there is a passenger seat) essentially lie down to drive, like luge riders, sliding into the oncoming world feet first.

The windscreen is the door and hinges open at the top like a glazed trapdoor, allowing the steering column to hinge forward on hydraulics. You step inside and duck under the roof sill as you recline on the chocolate bar-like seats. The black panels to the rear of the front wheels are the side windows, allowing you to see the ankles of pedestrians and wheel nuts of other traffic in perfect detail, along with the wing mirrors housed inside the front wheel arches.

While cars like this would become the main application of the pop-up headlight, this doesn't have them. Instead there are ten small lights across the slot on the front, and the rear lights house 80+ tiny red bulbs (well before the advent of LEDs, after all). The car is in fact the first use of sequential indicators, opting to animate the front and rear lights instead of using anything as vulgar as orange indictor lights.

Few concepts before this were this extreme yet functional. Bertone showed the Alfa Romeo Carabo in 1968, and the month before this was shown, Pininfarina displayed the almost equally spacecraft-like Ferrari 512 S Modulo. This car is built from the crashed remains of a Lancia Fulvia Coupé 1.6 HF rally car, the modest (113hp) but rally-tuned 1.6L V4 engine housed beneath the side-hinged triangular louvres, and was constructed without Lancia's knowledge. A couple of months prior to the reveal, Nuccio Bertone came clean to Lancia and asked to put a Lancia badge on what his firm had built. Lancia wanted to see it, so he drove it through Milan, which looked like this:

As I heard it, the gate guard at Lancia was only aware Bertone had arrived when he drove under the barrier, not bothering to sign in. It's the kind of car where these possibly apocryphal stories are made plausible by the implausibility of the car itself; if impossibilities like this could be real, who knows what can happen? In a way the point of one-off concepts like this is to make us dream, push us to imagine better futures where cars like this roam the streets. It certainly pushed Lancia, who observed the buzz around this car and commissioned Bertone to co-build with them a car to replace the Fulvia Coupé that would improve on the Fulvia's already impressive rally record.

That, Bertone did, and even retained the name; a straight line exists between this car and Lancia's legendary status in rallying. The Stratos HF prototype was first shown in 1971, entered production in 1973 and was homologated for rally in 1974, winning the rally chamionship for three years running until internal politics at the FIAT group meant factory support for Lancia rallying was pulled.

The Stratos Zero also caught Lamborghini's eye, and Gandini was hired to design a successor for the Miura. Along with the wedge profile, the early Countach shared the upswept cowling on the rear wheel and the chocolate-bar seats, and the flat, extremely-pitched windscreen, although Gandini reused the scissor doors from the Carabo rather than retaining the hatch-like door/window.

I've been waiting for this model for about 30 years. It appeared in a favourite book of mine in its silver guise, and compared to the copper orange I think it's immeasurably better looking, even if that's its original look. When the recent Hammer Drop series debuted the casting in orange I was disappointed, but luckily I was able to find this silver version from the Marcello Gandini two-pack on its own on ebay for barely over the price of a single car (I already had the red Countach 5000QV from the Jay Leno series, naturally). I understand the Stratos Zero is kind of unpopular compared to other cars in that series, but the only reason I can imagine is that people perhaps understandably don't realise it's not a fantasy car, or at least not entirely. I think it's a stretch to call it fully real either.

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A comparative rarity here: you seldom find the same vehicle from two manufacturers. The same general car in different colours, sure, but not replicas of specifically the exact same car.

Both Tomica (always on the left) and Hot Wheels (always on the right) made models of the Lamborghini Sián FKP 37 based on the appearance of the car when it was revealed in 2019, with what Lamborghini call 'electric gold' paint - my impression is that it's a complex iridescent metallic paint with a green-gold shift that's hard to photograph in the same way Nissan's famous Midnight Purple III paint is. The car is a limited-run special model, based on the Aventador but with Lamborghini's first hybrid system, a curious system integrating an electric motor and supercapacitor into the gearbox. This is less a system to provide higher speed than it is a system powering low-speed manoeuvring and reversing, ideally preventing the whole overheating-and-catching-fire-in-Monaco-traffic schtick unique to owners of insanely expensive cars with enormous engines designed to be cooled by airflow (pic related):

The supercapacitor replaces the more common but much heavier battery pack and will barely power the car for more than a couple of kilometres, making this particular hybrid system unique in concept, not to mention almost entirely useless for improving fuel economy or reducing emissions. As a result this is Lamborghini's most powerful car ever at 807hp.

Unusually, no bulls were referenced in the naming of the car. 'Sián' is a Bolognese dialect word meaning a flash of lightning (becuz hybrid but also real fast, geddit?) but the 'FKP 37' references instead Ferdinand Karl Piëch, 1937-2019, grandson of Ferdinand Porsche and eventually chairman of Volkswagen, overseeing the purchase of Lamborghini by the VW group and essentially saving the company from bankruptcy (for about the 54th time). They made 63 of them, and 19 roadsters. I can't say it's a particular favourite of mine, mixing as it does the familiar Lamborghini look with the excessively sci-fi styling of the 2017 Terzo Millenio concept. I find it rather egregious, overstyled and kind of ugly, yet still somehow appealing.

Since I want at least one example of every car I even vaguely like (i.e. every Lamborghini except the Veneno), I pre-ordered the No.89 Tomica sight-unseen in 2021 when it appeared (delayed by COVID from 2020) on Amazon.jp, but later found the HW 2021 debut version going cheap on there and realised I could really do an apples-to-apples comparison in this case. Both are almost identically sized, although the Tomica is heavier.

First, colour. For me the Tomica wins this, with a deeper more complex lustre to the green-gold and a little more shade variation with angle. By comparison the HW is perhaps more metallic, but thinner and flatter. However, the deciding factor to me is detail - where the HW has a tampo Lamborghini badge and detail around the headlights and front corner aero leading up over the wheel arch vents, on the Tomica this detail is painted in satin slate grey (I added the silver around the lights), and continues around the bottom of the windscreen, on the side intakes, rear wheel arches and stabilising fins at the ends of the spoiler while HW leaves all this body-coloured, using the interior piece for the side intakes (I added the black detail myself on the HW version). The Tomica also has a Lamborghini badge tampo. From a different perspective, HW has made 4 colour variants and one more is coming later this year, while Tomica had 4 in total, 2 of which were rare limited editions, before discontinuing the model.

in terms of sculpting, the Tomica again is the better of the two. The HW ends the roof glass too far back, omits engine cover seams and the filler cap is barely defined, leaving the top rear insufficiently defined. The air channels at the base of the windscreen are part of the metal on the Tomica but part of the window on the HW, but the HW has wipers where the Tomica omits them, and both omit mirrors. The window piece over the engine is is well defined on both, but the rough-textured side windows let the HW down. Using the interior for the side intakes is a great idea, though, and adds potential for interesting colour variation in future versions.

The rear view is probably where the two models most differ. The HW uses tampos on the interior piece for the lights and plate, also using a tampo to add the green of the lower diagonal bodywork pieces and appearing to have a horizontal seam in the centre which doesn't actually exist on the real car. However, it adds a licence plate with authentic Lamborghini typography. The Tomica integrates the whole light assembly into the metal body and uses the base for the vent and exhausts, but omits the plate entirely. The exhausts came painted silver on the Tomica whereas I had to add that detail myself on the HW. The diffuser is more accurate to reality on the Tomica.

Underneath, the Tomica is also better, with a little chassis detail along with scale information, whereas the HW is almost entirely smooth and as ever has no scale. Note both were originally riveted and the M2 bolts and washers are my addition.

Where wheels are concerned, main line Hot Wheels will win over Classic Tomica almost every time. Classic Tomica vehicles' main weakness is the lamentable and honestly incomprehensible lack of wheel variety, modernity and detail (whereas with Premiums, the opposite is true - while they lack rubber tyres, every Premium Tomica gets unique wheels corresponding to the real car's wheels, elevating them above HW premiums in my view). That being said, the gold ring on the Tomica doesn't look bad, and the chrome wears better than the HW chrome. These HW wheels look really nice on this colour of car and for once, praise be, they resisted the temptation to make the back wheels bigger.

Looking inside we can discover the last secrets of the Sián. The HW has more credible reclined seats, but the engine detail is lacking compared to the Tomica, which also has a better-defined steering wheel and potentially has room to fit a driver figure if you're into that. It's also interesting to note how different the sculpt of the central console is, though I haven't seen a picture of the car's interior so I can't say which is more realistic.

Hope you enjoyed this compare and contrast exercise; if I had to nominate a 'winner' it would be the Tomica, but maybe with the HW wheels swapped in. Only two other noteworthy things here: 1) the Tomica has suspension, which is a delightful but pointless feature that is appealing as a tactile feature inasmuch as it's fun to press on the roof and feel it go ba-dump ba-dump, and 2) what the hell is that rectangle embossed into the base just in front of the rear axle all about? It appears on the inside of many, but not all HW car bases and here as in most it is entirely hidden and contains no markings or indication of its purpose.

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Another alfa for your enjoyment, here's the 155 V6 Ti.

This is Hot Wheels Boulevard No. 55, released in 2022, the debut release for this casting. The car is a racing variant of the car, obviously, and raced in the DTM series. This livery is a recreation of the 1993 car driven by Nicola Larini for factory team Alfa Corse, who won the series that year and took the car to first place in 11 of the 22 races. This is a record which has never been surpassed.

I've got to admit I have never really clicked with Alfa Romeo. There are numerous really cool Alfas, but Alfa Romeo are a pretty general manufacturer with a broad range, and there's little overall coherence to the marque that really creates a particular identity that a lot of other manufacturers manage to give their cars. However, I think this model brought me a little closer to what attracts people to Alfas.

To my eye the 155 is typical of many Alfa Romeos in that it's not a very special car in everyday road car form; perfectly OK and a lot better than many cars, but not especially a car that you'd notice. My particular enthusiasm is for rally cars, a field Alfa Romeo have not particularly dominated. What interests me with rally is the idea of taking an everyday car and developing it, elevating it, improving it to reach speeds and cross terrain it was never meant to, to become something recognisable and yet utterly unlike what it began as, to entirely transcend what it was intended to be. Touring car racing generally begins with more high-end cars so it doesn't really strike me in the same way usually, but that transcendent spirit is visible in this 155.

It feels underdoggy and raw as a racer, and has the same energy for me as the Metro 6R4, an everyday car turned into a rampaging beast with a boxy ugly bodykit, lunatic V6 and 4WD. And as I read further about it, I learned that it inherited much of the internal workings of what is probably my favourite "if-you-could-only-have-one" car, the Lancia Delta Integrale, itself a serial winner and holder of a never-bettered record in rallying. Accordingly, I pay a lot more attention to Alfas now.

This is a really good model, and a great example of what premium Hot Wheels ought to be. Not only is the cross and Biscione livery gloriously detailed and, fuzzy rear quarter Alfa Corse graphics aside, beautifully sharp, the car has multiple parts, including a printed spoiler and a really great full roll cage piece too, like they used to in the good old days. I love a good roll cage!

Isn't it a brilliant piece of work, though? This is what a premium model should be. It also shows why I routinely open up my cars - to appreciate the fine workmanship fully and add some extra touches to the interior that really make it shine, like the 12 o'clock mark, seatbelts, handbrake and fire extinguisher (I did wonder about a shade band, but I'm unconvinced). If only all premiums were this well made, they might start to approach value for money.

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An elegy for a pegwarmer: the Alfa Romeo GTV6 3.0, a car that despite being really cool has flown off the pegs much like a dead butterfly doesn't. This is a rare South African-exclusive homologation special built in Pretoria to battle BMWs in SA touring car racing and successful in that aim, the strongest strain of a car with the legendary Busso V6 engine that won rallies, won Touring Car races, took second overall at the 24 hours of Spa. It was a pretty car with glory coming out of its ears, logically it should sell like hot cakes. So why are these clogging all the dump bins?

My diagnosis is the lack of a good set of graphics. The Fraser Campbell sculpt and debut #6 race livery was all right - I missed the red one, which I wanted, and snagged the white version as one of the first two Hot Wheels I bought (shout out to Matalan, the most unexpected yet surprisingly and consistently fruitful local HW source I've found yet) on getting back to the Untied Kingdom from Japan, the other being the red Pajero Evo. I had been really excited to learn the GTV6 was coming out but rather underwhelmed by what we eventually got. The awesome new wheels were the best thing about it.

Next was the World Tour premium version in plain red, which was nice, if a bit undistinguished, but 1) only a very small number of places near me sell premiums, 2) I had virtually no money and 3) having gotten used to paying ¥899($5.96US) for HW premiums, finding they were now £9($11.63US) a pop elicited a big large "fuck that!" from me (and I'm certain many people have it worse where HW prices are concerned, and you have my sympathy, but on a purely personal level this is just too much for me to consider anything but very occasional premiums, and only when they are discounted).

And then came the 2024 releases. Under shop lights this metalflake blue just doesn't look great, and seems not quite the right colour for an Alfa, particularly not a hot Alfa like this, it lacked the nice 4-poke wheels, and my inclination was to pass. I kept telling myself to just get this but when it came to it there was always a better option, until today. Happily I find I don't regret it at all when viewed under my own lighting, even if it is missing its Quadrifoglio badge.

One thing's for sure: it is much better than the other 2024 colour, the light grey. I can swallow the blue as a colour they might have offered in 1983, but I just can't fathom what made them choose that colour for this car. It's such a 2020s colour, absolutely wrong for this era of car. Matte, as a primer coat on an in-progress restoration project is plausible, and silver works, but not gloss putty grey. Still, I might have gotten that and set about it with sandpaper - had anything from the 2024 D case appeared anywhere in my area, but I'm pretty sure that entire case just failed to arrive in the UK in any quantity, given how hard it is to find anything much from that batch for sale on eBay, even now.

And the fact they made not one but two rare black ones - the world tour chase, and a Target exclusive 'Red edition' nobody outside America even gets to have a shot at - that really boils my piss. The reason most people know this car is because it was featured in the Bond film Octopussy in 1983 in black, and that's how I most wanted to get it.

I had a black 1:43ish Solido one as a kid and loved it. I made one of the main rival cars in Deliverance: Trans Europe Express a black GTV6 because of this. I tried my level best to get hold of a model of every one of the 27 race entries in the book, and while I knew some wouldn't be doable (Has there ever been a 1:64 model of a Lada VTFS or a TVR 390?) the difficulty of getting hold of an Alfa Romeo GTV6 of any type amazed me. Back then I had money so paying way over the odds for a silver model by Spanish brand Guisval, who I'd never even heard of, was an annoying necessity. It had tatty stickers approximating a race livery which I got annoyed about and took off.

Alongside the inevitable Aston Martins and Lotuses and so on, HW do a number of fairly incidental Bond cars like the Thunderball Mustang or Goldfinger Continental, so it's really not that unreasonable to expect them to make an Octopussy GTV6. Hey-ho, maybe next year.

The Boulevard release is somewhat hopeful. That looks properly great, beautiful and fitting livery with great details, and like any Boulevard, I'm sure it's been widely collected. It would be a shame for this fine casting to sink without trace. If you don't have one, I bet you could find one without much hunting, and you really should, it's cool.

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Cyberpunk Hot Wheels is where I'm going today. I'm not going to gatekeep what cyberpunk is or isn't here, this is not the forum for it and I expect everyone's sick of the discourse by now - I'm talking visual style and broad strokes concepts only.

Recently I featured the Syd Mead-designed Sentinel 400 limo, and while not all of Syd Mead's designs are cyberpunk, in fact I'd argue the majority aren't, this guy designed the movie that basically defined what cyberpunk looks like (Blade Runner, in case you're not following). The Sentinel fits the bill, but as I said in the Sentinel post, it's not seen shops since 2006. But I think in recent years HW have started to really refocus their design to appeal to adults at least as much if not more than they are aimed at kids. So of course, the obvious thing to look at is THE Cyberpunk car: the 1977 Porsche 911 Turbo (930).

If you're not a video game person, you may be scratching your head. The video game Cyberpunk 2077, based on a classic pen-and-paper RPG, features a number of driveable cars the player can acquire, and as an action RPG there are naturally unique special shiny ones, the shiniest of them being the car owned by Johnny Silverhand, the player's kind-of companion (it's complicated). As a rock star, he of course owned a priceless classic, and though a Porsche 930 is not that special now, given the dates this is a 100 year old car at the time the game occurs. It's kitted out with a variety of futuristic sensors and such to make it interconnect with 2077 traffic tech, hence the curious patterns on the bodywork. In reality one of the lead developers was a Porsche fanatic, reportedly crunching developers in order to meet deadlines and overpromising for the lower-end console versions to meet sales targets because he desperately wanted to buy one, and likely the car was shoehorned in for that reason - but the design is superb despite that. Sadly, the 2022 HW release by Dmitriy Shakhmatov, re-released in 2024, is their only car from the game (they should really licence a couple more, car design in CP77 is fab), but it's far from the only Cyberpunk-style HW car .

This take on the 1968 Camaro is a 2023 design by Dwayne Vance that takes the hot rod custom approach HW is known for and turns it to full Mad Max mode (does Mad Max count as cyberpunk? I always saw it as what's going on in the countryside while more traditional cyberpunk is what's happening in the cities). Atypically he did the first livery as well as the sculpting, apparently using motifs from a short story he wrote, though I have no clue where you can read it, I would be very interested to. There's post dedicated to this car on Orange Track Diecast which is worth a look. The 2024 versions of the car, however, were very disappointing generic racing liveries and appeared not to be interested in leveraging the design's stylistic choices at all.

Also by Vance and using the 'screaming skull' visuals are a Track Fleet artic truck, which I don't have, called the Cyberrig, and the above car, the Track Dwagon. This plastic body/metal base car is supposedly inspired by a real Subaru L-series estate customised by Travis Pastrana, which also features flappy downforce-enhancing aero bits. The same skull, kanji characters and diagonal striping motif is present, and this car also has some hangul just behind the front wheels and a graffiti tag-style 'Vance' on the rear quarter. Despite the plastic body these were must-get cars for me, they are really cool built-from-what's-at-hand cars very much in keeping with the cyberpunk ethos. The Track Fleet car has somewhat tempted me at times but not enough to shell out for it (they're expensive in the UK!).

Another design by Vance that exudes a cyberpunk feel of tech meets necessity, the 2021 DAVancenator (man likes naming cars after himself, it seems) makes a feature of blending window and bodywork. I only have this second colour debut one, but later versions used a transparent window/body which rather spoil the effect by defining a windscreen outline, and overall it makes me think of the Lancia Sibilo, a Bertone concept which had a plastic unibody that was simply made transparent where on metal-bodied cars there'd be seams and glass. It also reminds me of Masamune Shirow's windowless vehicles that project a simulated view onto the inside of an armoured hull. That's why I've paired it with Ryu Asada's 2018 Cyber Speeder, a car which has perfectly normal side windows but a fully zamac-obscured forward view, along with glow-in-the-dark wheels and deco elements and a curious rarity for HW: a driver and passenger. This car is more cyber than punk, but leans into it a lot more comprehensively and coherently than a lot of the fantasy designs do.

Another fantasy design that looks like it would work in a cyberpunk setting is the HW K.I.T.T. Concept by Charlie Angulo, and I think Knight Rider as a story is, if not actually cyberpunk, at least cyberpunk-adjacent. Where the 3rd generation Firebird was a wedge car par excellance, this is an amplification of that car's futuristic aura and looks great. The 'shine a light up from under the car' gimmick is less successful, but it's definitely a good original idea on paper.

It's not only the fantasy or semi-fantasy cars that reflect the new enthusiasm HW have for cyberpunk. The 2024 Legends tour winner was this Mazda, a project by Tofu Auto Works of New Zealand that absolutely reeks of the influence of cyberpunk visuals even if the builder Chris Watson didn't explicitly say as much. Speaking as someone with no particular affinity for the MX-5, this is by far my favourite MX-5 I've yet seen.

The reason for the resurgence in interest in cyberpunk is pretty complex. The game was perhaps a major catalyst and gateway, and its metamorphosis from broken disappointment to unignorably redeemed through updates and expansions has kept it in the public eye. Then there's the 30-year rule; while cyberpunk as a genre was around significantly earlier, 1995 was the year that I'd say it really hit the mainstream. Movies from that year:

Ghost In The Shell

Hackers

Strange Days

Johnny Mnemonic

Judge Dredd

The Net

Virtuosity

The City Of Lost Children

Waterworld

12 Monkeys

Batman Forever

And that's just the cyberpunkish ones. Go find a list, it's wild how many great films came out in '95. Then I don't know if you've heard the phrase 'boring dystopia', but prior to Agent Orange becoming the boss of 'Murica, I was hearing it quite a lot as more and more people began to realise how messed up our ordinary lives have gradually been becoming, frog-in-cooking pot style; now we're all learning exactly what the famous curse dressed as a blessing, "may you live in interesting times," means. The ubiquity of bullshit so-called 'AI' and the sheer breakneck speed that it appeared, wowed everyone with its capabilities and evolved from fascinating curiosity through potent tool to blight on the entire internet and job market alike has added fresh, zesty technological angst to the suddenly-not-boring-enough dystopia. In such a socio-political landscape cyberpunk fiction is as natural a fit as watching Outbreak was in 2021 - and guess when that came out? I'm glad HW is at least somewhat staying abreast of this, I just wish they'd embrace it more. Where's the Elysium GT-R? Where's the Judge Dredd '95 Land Rover? Where's the Dodge Turbo Interceptor from The Wraith?

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I had a great idea about Lamborghinis and I wrote a massive screed all about it. It took me several days and a near total rewrite and by the time I was finished I completely doubted my idea and was thoroughly annoyed by it, so that's not happening now. So instead, a briefer post about new Mustangs.

As I understand it, the GTD and Dark Horse are basically the end of petrol-powered Mustangs for Ford, hence the absolute egregiousness of the GTD and its comparably stratospheric price and 'limited edition' of 1000. I do quite like the Dork Hearse, although the GTD less so. The body kit really screws with perceived proportion. It seemed over-tall and its wheels seemed too big, but comparing it to photos, the proportions actually seem right. It's just funny-looking.

The more one reads about it, the more the GTD seems like American Exceptionalism: The Car. GTD immediately suggests diesel power to me, but of course not - It's Grand Touring Daytona, an IMSA class which apparently uses the spec for FIA GT3 racers. So why is it GTD, not GT3? Because even though FIA is a global organisation, IMSA is an American organisation despite the I standing for International, kind of how the baseball World Series is the world according to Americans who don't have passports because the USA is soOo00o big and contains everything they could ever possibly want. For whatever reason (definitely not cultural insecurity or a national inferiority complex) they had to make their own thing that's the same as the other thing, but American.

I'm not really into that spoiler and how it's mounted, or the ludicrous vents round the front wheels. I previously passed on the GTD when I saw it in shops and mostly got it to compare with other Mustangs.

It's as tall as the 2005 Time Attack Custom and the 2018 RTR #25 drift car and as wide at the doors, but the 2018 GT Gulf #19 racer is lower. Nothing earth-shaking there, really.

Now for something really heretical: I can't help wondering what Mustangs would look like now if Ford hadn't decided to do fastback first-gen Mustangs again and then just stuck with that. What if Mustang, but new and original? Or would the Mustang have gone away entirely and we'd be talking about the Probe GTD?

[secretcatpolicy]

Can you name a rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive rally car that ran in Group B? Yes, the Porsche 911 SC RS, very good. How about for a factory team, though?

Matchbox produced this (rather stained and discoloured, but this was a bargain at £6; have you seen what these in decent condition go for on ebay these days!?) Skoda 130 LR from 1987 to 1989, at a time when this car's Group B career was over due to the demise of the series. The nature of Group B tends to make people forget today that every competitor was a good car (Except the Citroen BX4TC, maybe - that was certainly one of the rally cars ever), but a few were legitimately legendary; their success shouldn't detract from the quality of lower placed cars. The Skoda 130 LR was a valiant attempt by Skoda to build a car that could compete at the top levels of rally, and it ran in Group B in 1984, 1985 and 1986.

The 130 stood for its horsepower, an unimpressive figure seen next to the likes of the Lancia Delta S4's rumoured 800-900, perhaps, but the S4 was a lot heavier than the Skoda, which weighed in at just 720kg. And the comparison with the 911 was not so far off the mark, as the 130 RS of the '70s was a serious circuit contender in its day and sometimes called 'the Porsche of the East'. Skoda engineers had quite a pedigree to call on to help them achieve results.

What they didn't have was the cutting edge tech that made Group B such a bonkers series, though. The Skoda 105 on which the 130LR was originally based had been intended to be a front-engine, front-wheel-drive car, but permission to produce it was denied by Moscow on the grounds that it would have been better than Russian-built cars, which couldn't possibly be permitted. So Skoda had to iterate on their rather outdated rear-engined formula again, and when it came to the racers, they also had to do without 4WD, forced induction, advanced aero, exotic composites or really anything fancier than a very light car with no more than adequate power. That they scored some top ten finishes in the same series as the likes of the Audi quattro S1 and Peugeot 205 T16 was a testament to this rather plain and dumpy car's merits. "Surprising Skoda" indeed.

Skoda in the UK was always an underdog. As a kid, "I bet your dad drives a Skoda!" could only be countered by "Well I bet yours drives a Lada!", so great was public contempt for these eastern-bloc cars. I also had no love for them until 1988, when my mum and I went to Iceland on holiday and spent a week driving across the country from Reykjavik to Akureyri. As a car-mad kid I immediately noticed the difference between British and Icelandic traffic. There were relatively few little hatchbacks and nothing like a sports car, but what there were a lot of fell into a pretty small group of cars: Land Cruisers, Pajeros, Volvos, 4wd Tercels, occasional American 4wds like Blazers and Broncos... and Ladas, and Skodas.

We rented a little white Suzuki SJ413 like the Edocar one seen above; in fact, we rented two, the first of which got us half way across Iceland before dying. We jumpstarted the first, drove back to Reykjavik, exchanged it for another but the second Suzuki died a mile out from the rental place, before we had even left the tarmac. We walked back and got a Lada Niva, which my mum loved, reporting that it felt like driving a tank. Iceland in the summer was gloriously warm and mythically beautiful, but still it defeated two superb Japanese off-roaders with ease, so we could only imagine what it would ask of a car in the winter. My childish ignorance was suitably corrected: no aspersions ought to be cast on eastern bloc cars, the Niva was the AK47 of cars: simple, functional, brutal and phenomenally tough and did its job admirably, and so I expect were Skodas of the time, going by their commonality in Iceland. If the Icelandic drive it, it's tough.

[secretcatpolicy]

It's surprising to me more is not made of one of the greatest artist collabs Hot Wheels has ever done: no, not that ludicrous Daniel Arsham 'eroded' stuff or the silly Ornamental Conifer Camaros, I'm talking about Syd Mead (1933-2019).

Anyone whose job title is 'visual futurist' you know is going to be interesting, and he's best known for his work on Blade Runner, but he also worked on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Tron, 2010, Short Circuit, Aliens, Timecop, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission: Impossible III, Elysium, Tomorrowland and Blade Runner 2049, and his wonderful art has influenced many more. He's one of the artists who's shaped what 'futuristic' looks like in everyone's heads, basically. And in 2002 Nathan Proch worked with Mead to sculpt the Sentinel 400 limo from one of Mead's artworks:

Mead drove, and loved, a 1972 Imperial LeBaron, (Imperial was a model, but became to Chrysler as DS has become to Citroen, or as Lexus still is to Toyota, a luxury sub-marque) a huge, black, luxurious cruiser with a giant chrome grille and ridges along its flanks forming vestigial fins front and rear, square and there, looming, arriving like a weather front. Its lines are echoed in the Sentinel 400 to a certain degree, but the Sentinel is a lower slung car entirely, like the LeBaron had a child with a Bertone wedge concept car, retaining the blunt nose but slicking way back into what has to be a miniscule coefficient of drag. I don't particularly go for luxury cars but the Sentinel I make a definite exception for. It epitomises Syd Mead's genius for extrapolating contemporary, extant design cues into the future in flawlessly plausible ways.

The debut of this car was in this glorious dark metallic teal shade with a matte black roof and rear, making it a superb villain's car in my eye, sophisticated, stylish and fundamentally untouchable. But the next widely released version of the car was a complete re-imagining of the car as a police vehicle; I've been on the lookout for one of these that wasn't too damaged or expensive for about 5 years now, and happily it arrived today.

Naturally it says 'POLICE' in large, unfriendly letters, but what really sets the mood with this thing is the other detail. Where other US police cars might be expected to say 'call 911' or 'to serve and protect' or some city motto, this says 'unofficial police business' and 'urbancontrol'. These are mean cops. They aren't here to save you.

I always feel a little cheated by police vehicles that lack a light bar, but not here - it would spoil the lines too much. Alongside the gold and white stripes it looks corporate and privatised, exactly as one might expect dystopian police to look. It's a superbly well-judged livery. Unfortunately, aside from one identical to this but a lighter shade of blue, this was the last well-judged livery, after this there were four releases that were as gaudy and unlovely as you might expect from a early to mid 2000s fantasy Hot Wheels casting, and the car seems to have disappeared after 2006. I wish they'd bring it back, and do more collabs with artists like this; Maciej Kuciara comes to mind immediately.

As usual, I have been unable to resist a little tinkering. As well as indicators and brakelights, the teal one now has period-incorrect aerodisc front wheels that I feel look better than the original 5-spokes and truer to the original artwork, while the police version has more curtly functional black 5-spokes replacing the silver ones it came with.

I have a third, formerly a battered and chipped teal one that I stripped and scrubbed ready to repaint, but never actually got to painting, and in my present situation, sadly it'll remain a work in progress for quite a while, I expect. A look inside reveals that it's actually a six-seater with two rear-facing passengers, a steering yoke rather than a wheel, computer terminals in the back and apparently a killer sound system. It looks quite nice in bare metal but the brushed metal clashes a bit with the chrome and I'd like to give it more shine and some clearcoat if I were to leave it unpainted. Truth to tell, I never decided on a colour. Glossy black is an obvious if unimaginative option, although ivory, bronze or burgundy might suit the car. What colour do you think would look best?

[secretcatpolicy]

A slightly controversial opinion: the BMW i8 is really cool. It's pretty popular to hate this car for a number of offences, chief among them being its fraudulent engine noise, which I absolutely agree is a bad idea, the 'weedy' 3-cylinder engine of a BMW Mini, and the fact it's not really a 'supercar', whatever that means. Some also scorn its styling, and it is, I'll admit, a bit of a marmite car in the looks department. And, inevitably, there are those who don't like it because it's a hybrid.

Those thickies are the worst ones, and it's through them, or rather it's through demolishing their idiotic position we can start to argue the car's case. Hybrids are widely misunderstood and have gained a bit of an undeserved negative reputation, especially in the US, which is ironic; the US loves its pick-ups, arguing they are the most versatile vehicles available in terms of application (even though the Transit van is, like, right there), yet many Americans scorn hybrids, the most versatile in terms of keeping them moving. The fact Toyota's gone with hybrids over pure EVs is a revealing choice too. Would you want to bet against Toyota? There are many flavours of hybrid, but the i8 is a 'through-the-road' parallel hybrid, meaning it has two entirely separate drivetrains which drive different wheels. In this case, the rear wheels are driven by the petrol engine, and the front wheels are driven by the electric motors, making it amazingly flexible.

The fact it's a plug-in hybrid also means you can charge it from a charger or just from driving on petrol, and that it'll run in EV mode, petrol mode or combine both drivetrains for 4wd hybrid driving, and you get very good fuel economy with no range anxiety and maximum flexibility. The two drive modes allow each powertrain to excel in its own forte, so the electrics can assist with acceleration and recoup energy while assisting with braking, whereas you can use petrol while driving on a motorway at a constant speed; and while I don't like the BMW Minis, I respect them, because a turbo 3-cylinder is nothing to sneer at, just ask the WRC-winning Toyota Yaris. The i8 does 0-60 in 4.2 seconds and has an electronically limited top speed of 155 (which I'm sure a decent ECU programmer could improve on) so there's clearly more to it than economy. You'd think it would be really heavy with two separate powertrains, but in fact it's 200kg lighter than a Nissan GT-R. It isn't quite as high performance as the GT-R but the fact is, it isn't trying to be.

The i8 had several concept iterations which help reveal what it is trying to be. Early versions were called the BMW Vision EfficientDynamics; if you've seen Mission: Impossible 4, you've seen one version of it. Conceptually, then, it began as an exercise in making an eco-sports halo car to show off BMW's new direction. Thankfully almost all the ugly, gaudy blue lights and stuff (why do hybrids all have a bunch of blue stuff?) went away and for production it was remixed at the last minute with another concept: the BMW M1 Hommage [sic]. The appearance of a futuristically curvy take on the M1 makes it a very striking car, but it sets up a problematic expectation.

It makes people expect the i8 to be a purebred racer, a lunatic car built for the track like the M1, but the hybrid should give it away: it's just an exotic-looking sporty road car with cool new tech. It's not trying to be the fastest thing out there, just be fast enough and pretty enough to give the driver a smile on the twisties and in the car park, while making less environmental impact than the average sports car. People compare it to Rimacs and the like when they should compare it to the Honda CR-Z.

I just got the Hot Wheels i8 roadster, which I skipped originally, but which bothered me when I did. I would have bought it straight off but my thought process when I found it was "oh, cool, the i8 roadster…Oh. Eww. Nope" as soon as I saw the incorrect colouring (all i8s are twotone, colour + black, but this model arrived in monochrome dark silver) and plain black wheels. I may yet get the black one if it comes my way. I've mostly remedied the colouring, although not really as well as I would have liked, and will likely find some decent wheels eventually, but there's nothing I can do about the window contours. I cant decide which the windows most resemble, a '70s speedboat windscreen or 2000s Matrix-esque sunglasses. Nice though the brown interior is, it's overall not remotely as good looking as the coupe. Of those, I have two, a silver Tomica (wheelswaped, the best by a wide margin) and a white Siku (oversized 1:55, rubber tyres, pretty good), having evaded the nasty orange metallic colour scheme that BMW seem to have liked using to promote the car.

I used the past tense there, as BMW seem to have given up on the i8. Even though the roadster only debuted in 2018 they stopped making them in 2020, having sold 20,000 or so, and for some reason they haven't replaced it with anything else that uses similar or better tech, although I'm sure this car and the equally late i3 helped get BMW's other i-branded models working that much better. But who knows why BMW do anything these days; I certainly don't. They were among the first out of the gate among traditional European marques with electric cars, but they've largely squandered that lead; clearly their priority was developing larger and larger kidney grilles, and these lean little i8 pseudogrilles just didn't cut it.

[secretcatpolicy]

Here we go with the first of the '&c' post in 'Diecast &c': as a Japanologist of absolutely no renown or repute whatsoever, car enthusiast generally and Nissan enthusiast in particular (I currently have 79 Nissans/Datsuns in my collection, more than any other make, so to make this more visually appealing and break up the wall of text I'll throw some entirely unrelated shots in as we go, 'cos this is a long one), the surpassing oddness that I know as The Carlos Ghosn Clusterfuck of 2018-2019 has fascinated me ever since it happened. 

In case you are unaware, Ghosn was the boss of Nissan, and of Renault and of the overall alliance of these companies, and was suddenly arrested on arrival to Japan in November 2018 and held in prison for months, including being repeatedly re-arrested each time he was due to be released. He had been boss of Nissan for 18 years at that point and was responsible for saving Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi from bankruptcy and making them successful again, but was suddenly being painted as a criminal. Eventually he was released from prison and put under house arrest, but he suddenly made a dramatic escape from Japan by hiding in a box and the box being loaded into a private jet, whereafter he fled to Lebanon.

So much about what was made public about it was and remains simply... off; unbelievable, illogical, incomplete. The overwhelming feeling was that everyone was being lied to somehow, that way more of the story existed out of public sight.  I've recently been reading about it in as close to Ghosn's own words as I'll likely ever get - the book Broken Alliances is supposedly co-authored by him and a journalist named Philippe Riès, but reads like it was commissioned by Ghosn and written by Riès. The book is very far from being objective and is really a pro-Ghosn/ anti 'hostage justice' screed, but is nonetheless very informative.

The big thing that people concentrate on when looking at this whole incident is the slightly absurd action/comedy movie-esque escape of Ghosn from a hotel party during his glorified house arrest, concealed inside a music equipment box, with the aid of a couple of ex-military guys, Michael and Peter Taylor, a private jet to Turkey and another to Lebanon.  Apparently this worked because Ghosn noticed that his police tail never followed him into hotels (nobody would ever do anything illegal in a hotel, right?), and the box he got in was too big to go through an X-ray machine, so...they just said OK and didn't check it?  This is all quite exciting, and also hilarious in its own way, but actually not the most interesting thing to me.

The thing that fascinates me is WHY and HOW any of this happened.  Having been interested in the workings of Japanese society since about 2004, I was aware of numerous scandals at large companies - Tepco, Minolta/Olympus, Toshiba, Kobe Steel and Takata being the most prominent of them.  All of them were about broadly different things but came down to a roughly similar thing - in each case, workers were found to have been doing something illegal and/or directly damaging to the company they worked for, and in every case they were doing it because senior management figures told them to.  Some of these caused massive risks to safety and all precipitated enormous losses of money and public opinion for their company. There was one other factor these scandals had in common: virtually no involvement of the law.

The Japanese way of dealing with this is a public apology as a sort of ritual performance; a press conference is called, the designated culprit uses their most formal language, apologises to everyone concerned and bows very deeply. This may include a resignation or demotion, but not usually a sacking, let alone the involvement of the cops.

Yet Ghosn was ambushed at Haneda airport and arrested at customs on his way to a board meeting. The police staged the arrest for the cameras, boarding the plane and lowering the blinds on camera long after Ghosn was already in custody. Greg Kelly was specifically asked to come to Japan by senior Nissan execs and arrested in an expressway parking area in an operation orchestrated very precisely with the co-operation of his driver. Ghosn's assistant narrowly escaped arrest by forgetting to turn on her phone until she was in her hotel, and was freaked out by all the messages she got when she did; she remained free by lying to the Nissan people who called her about where she was staying and literally getting the next flight out of the country. And it was three months until Ghosn was let out after being rearrested twice, interrogated for several hours every day and being kept in complete isolation from all prisoners and only allowed to see his legal team, no-one else, not even family.  Kelly, recovering from back surgery, was also kept in custody to the obvious detriment of his recovery.

Clearly this was a very different sort of scandal.  Ghosn must have done something really dreadful, right?  He was in fact swooped upon and arrested for...underreporting his salary, i.e. minor tax fraud, and very possibly accidental, the kind of thing for which you usually get a small fine.  The amounts were significant to you or me, but miniscule compared to Nissan's operating costs, or to the losses in the aforementioned scandals that involved no police at any point; Ghosn was in fact personally responsible for saving the company.  As he was held for the maximum period and then rearrested for different but still nebulous and under-evidenced reasons, the charges evolved eventually from income underreporting through accusations of getting a mate in Oman to do…something I really don't understand involving supplying collateral for a loan related to some weird insurance regarding currency conversion of his salary, and eventually it changed into vague and very smear-campaigny accusations that Ghosn was using company money to fund a "luxurious lifestyle" including multiple houses in different countries and parties at Versailles.  As the boss of a massive global company with bases worldwide, though, and expected to host parties for business purposes, wouldn't he need nice houses all over the world?  If Nissan bought him new suits for product launches and didn't ask for them back, was he stealing company property?  This is a man who could probably pay for all the things for which he was accused of misappropriating Nissan/Renault funds out of pocket if he had been asked to.  And I'm not a Ghosn apologist - I'm certain he massaged some figures to make sure he got the best of any deal he personally engineered, just as I would expect any corporate suit to do.  He might even deserve some jail time for it if it was egregious enough.  Ghosn openly admits to being a little annoyed that he voluntarily capped his pay at a relatively modest level following the 2008 crash - but he also turned down the opportunity to run GM, which (the book claims) was calculated would have made him worth at least $400 million.  Trying to claim a fabulously wealthy man committed crimes for honestly pretty meagre personal gain just doesn't really make sense.

The (admittedly near-rhetorical, we all know it's because he's not Japanese) question that sticks out to me is: why him? What's the justification for the cops stepping in on this case specifically and hounding the man the way they did? Why not, say, the top people at Olympus/Minolta?  They lost nearly 120 billion yen of investments, ordered accounting workers to hide it and tried to fire the British man who blew the whistle on it.  Why not nick and lock up forever the brass of Tokyo Electric Power company - Tepco - who were told the Fukushima reactors were insufficiently protected from tsunami years before the 2011 disaster, yet did nothing? Why not the top people at Kobe steel, who falsified data about the strength of thousands of tons of steel, aluminium and copper, meaning it was potentially not strong enough for the purposes it had been used for, like buildings, bridges, cars, planes...  Why not the people at Takata who ordered that thousands of known faulty airbags be delivered to auto manufacturers and used in new cars, resulting in 24 deaths to date?   Why not the people who inflated profit accounts by over a billion dollars across seven years, resulting in the disintegration of Toshiba?  All these are significantly more serious crimes yet across all these, only a handful of accountants at Minolta ever even saw a prison cell.  Why does the Japanese establishment consistently behave as if law is just not relevant to them, yet expect to be taken seriously in the world?

But I knew almost all of this. What reading Broken Alliances reveals is a little more of the real Why. Ghosn believes it's rooted partly in nationalism, and the history of Nissan supports this. My knowledge of Nissan's origins was incomplete; it doesn't only begin with Datsun, as I've heard, because they were taken over by the Nissan Group in 1933. That zaibatsu's roots lie smack in the middle of some of pre-war Japan's murkiest history: Manchukuo.  This was the name for the puppet state Japan created as a colony/vassal in Manchuria, having invaded and appropriated it from the Chinese in 1931. The Nissan Group's founder, Yoshisuke Aikawa, was recruited to build a new zaibatsu joint owned by the Japanese government to provide heavy industry to support the war in China. Aikawa was recruited by Nobusuke Kishi, a loathsome man responsible for conscripting at least 8 million Chinese across several years to work as slaves in Manchurian industry, who only escaped execution as a class A war criminal through the cold war-inspired Reverse Course of the purge of wartime ministers (sort of an Operation Paperclip for Japanese administrators).  As a nationalist bastard of the first order, Kishi was ideal Prime minister material, and later also grandfather of noted modern bastard PM Shinzo Abe and, like him, a big friend of the Moonies. Anyway, Yoshisuke Aikawa moved Nissan HQ to Manchuria as planned, but he correctly predicted the downfall of Germany and argued for accepting Jewish refugees; being both correct and humane, this annoyed the fascists in the IJA, and the Nissan group parted ways from the Manchurian Industrial Development Company and he returned to Japan in 1942, presumably with a large body of staff sympathetic to the Manchukuo project.

Interestingly, I had previously known Renault was once fully, and still partially, owned by the French government, but what I did not know was that this was an post-war punishment because of the company's complicity with the Vichy regime and occupying Nazis; it makes a Renault-Nissan team-up even more darkly appropriate.

The other piece of the puzzle is the true nature of the Nissan-Renault Alliance, which takes up a major part of the book and is pretty impenetrable if like me you are only lightly versed in Management-speak as a foreign language (so much synergy! At least Ghosn seems to actually know what this means).  As I can understand it, the general principle going into the Alliance was that it wasn't a merger - each company should own the lion's share of the other, so they would be connected but still distinct; independent, yet interdependent, and each would retain its own identity and markets while being able to share technology and hold car platforms in common.  However this mutual ownership was never quite equal, and while Nissan was long an independent company, the French government still held a pool of Renault shares and as such had a director to represent them on the Renault board. This effectively meant Nissan was in a way partly controlled by the French government. Ghosn's contract was due to end in 2018 but he was persuaded to return for another four years as head of the Alliance, with a clear goal for his final term: to make the union of Nissan-Mitsubishi and Renault "irreversible". Ghosn agreed to return for one more term as chairman only because he thought making the Alliance permanent would be a good business move, and the French government was pushing him.

This goal, in conjunction with the Florange Act, a new law passed in France giving double voting rights to long-term shareholders, put the frighteners on the Japanese side of the deal - not only what the book continually calls Nissan's Old Guard (i.e. the nationalists who resented foreign influence in Nissan and what they saw as unequal sharing of their tech with Renault with little in return) but the Japanese government, who quietly have people embedded in most industries who have retired from government posts to take up roles in the private sector as 'advisers' and so on, de facto go-betweens to let companies interact with government, in a process euphemistically called 'Amakudari' - 'descent from heaven'.  The fact the government had people on the inside meant it could collaborate with the Old Guard™ and actively implicate, smear and disgrace Ghosn and by extension his plan, preventing Nissan from falling under what was seen as excessive French government influence through Renault. Please stand and face the flag as Kimigayo plays.

In the end, there's no real evidence of Ghosn having committed any crime. I am forced to lay aside my previous conjecture, that it was partially orchestrated by Yakuza; honestly, the Yakuza are not this inept, nor as heavy-handed, and the extent to which the government, the prosecutors, the police and the traditionalists at Nissan all worked together to make this happen preclude any actual need for organised crime involvement.  My thought was that Yakuza tend to be skilled with frauds and financial crimes, so would have been useful allies in fabricating the substance of what Ghosn was alleged to have done; but since the police were not relying on anything as boringly conventional as 'evidence' or 'suspicion of any specific thing' to imprison Ghosn and Kelly, and were just doing what the prosecutors told them to, i.e. holding them on paper-thin charges with the full collusion of the judicial system and ministry and scrabbling around to try (and fail) to find some real crimes to charge them with, that idea is out.  Turns out the police really are just the biggest gang after all.

I can't really recommend this book to anyone who isn't generally fascinated by the Carlos Ghosn Clusterfuck; it's full of Management/Finance-speak, is dreadfully long-winded, unsurprisingly one-sided and is not shy about the agenda it wants to promote.  At the same time it is not uninteresting and provides insight I have never previously had, so maybe you'll find it interesting too. If nothing else, let this be a warning about the integrity of Japanese law and those who uphold it. Stay out of trouble!

[secretcatpolicy]

Recently I've been watching an Australian detective series called Troppo (when I saw it in the listings I assumed it was Italian, as in 'Adagio ma non troppo' and so on, but it's just the charming Aussie slang habit of ending everything with ~o, in this case meaning 'mentally affected by the tropical climate', i.e. "Strewth, he's gone troppo!"). It's a pretty good, largely formulaic series (which is both good and bad), well written and recommended if you enjoy a 'detective show as cultural showcase' approach, here used to introduce the remote, sweaty, crocodile-packed and faintly crazy wilds of Far North Queenland. The most prominent vehicles are a lovely old Peugeot 504 and a Jaguar E-type, but a significant feature in season 2 is that most distinctly Australian of vehicles, a Ute. I recognised the base model of this vehicle as a Vauxhall/Opel Frontera, a.k.a. Isuzu Rodeo, and I was quite surprised to see one 1) without a back end, 2) being used for what appeared to be actual serious work, and 3) with a Holden badge on its grille. I don't have a model of any incarnation of the Frontera/Rodeo, but instead here's my favourite Holden: a 1977 Holden LX Torana SS A9X.

Australian cars are fabulously familiar-yet-unknown for me. As a former British territory, it has a lot of historic connections with British cars but as the country grew into it's independence it increasinly went its own way in terms of cars, and one of those ways was the enthusiastic embrace of something very foreign to the British: the muscle car. Part of this is due to the presence of Ford and GM (Holden) as the biggest players in the market, and part is thanks to lots of long empty straight roads and empty places meaning Australia has a driving culture that emphasises long drives, and then there's a form of the wild frontier spirit that somehow meshes Trans Ams and Mustangs with outlaw cowboys and maverick lawmen uncannily smoothly.

This Torana is approximately an Aussie COPO Camaro, closer to a pony car than a real heavyweight muscle car. This is the homologation car that allowed Holden to build a car that would compete with Ford at Bathurst (note: somewhat to my surprise, this is pronounced 'bah-thirst', not 'bat-hurst'; Aussie English like the cars is always familiar-yet-unpredictable), the premier racetrack in Australia and venue of its most popular series, the Australian Touring Car Championship, and most popular race, the Bathurst 1000 (for the length in kilometres). While this series would later suffer a devastating Japanese invasion, in the 70s this was a 2-horse race: Ford Australia against Holden. The Torana A9X lost to the Ford Falcon at its debut in 1977, but in 1978 and 1979 it took victory, dominating in 1979 by 6 laps on its closest rival, setting an ATCC lap record too.

The thing about this car is that, as a GM product, it closely resembles other GM products. My first thought was that this was the Opel Manta with corks on its hat, but it's not. Then I thought the Opel Kadett/Vauxhall Astra (note the similarity to the Matchbox Kadett GT/E below), but again, close without hitting. The 80s would see many models simply be renamed and built elsewhere, but at this point Holdens were still unique, if similar to other models. The everyday cars are fairly unremarkable, but damn if GM didn't do nice hot boi versions of its cars back then.

This is a Hot Wheels Boulevard model, No. 77, from mid 2023, and is a really good illustration of why the Boulevard series is just about universally appealing. This thing, I think you'll agree, is cool as hell, and I had no idea the car existed until this released - not the first time this has happened. And if you go check Wikipedia, there's a picture of apparently this exact car. I'm not into every car from the Boulevard series but most are at the very least really good examples of their type.

I've bought this car twice. The first I preordered, but it didn't turn up before I had to leave Japan; I do wonder what ultimately happened to that one. My hope is that it got left in my post box and someone who moved into my apartment later discovered it and kept it. This one I ended up getting from ebay after the fact, as I wasn't about to come so close and accept defeat. This beast deserves better.

[secretcatpolicy]

An old-school Hot Wheels quartet for today, three kind-of-fantasy cars and one licenced. Today I have to credit Home Bargains for three of these and Poundland for the last. I'm normally not a roadster enthusiast when coupes are an option, but three of these are open to the elements.

Looking damn stylish, the first of these is the oldest if we go by the car itself. Based on a Cadillac Fleetwood V-16 Rumbleseat Roadster from 1934, this Fraser Campbell sculpt is not based to my knowledge on a real car. However, it's one of the most evocative aggressively 1930s designs I've ever seen and it puts me in mind of the most stylised renditions of that era, stuff like the Animated Batman TV series or the opening credits of Poirot on ITV. The oldest car I think I've ever seen that seems to be going fast when it's standing still. Very stylish, although I'll need to revisit the silver detailing I added on the wheel fairings.

Moving on, a very famous and oft-produced casting from the Hot Wheels roster, the Purple Passion. 2024 saw the debut of a model of the Hirohata Merc, a replica of a notorious and very influential 'Kustom' based on a '51 Mercury Club 8 coupe and built by Barris Customs for Bob Hirohata in 1954; I'll tell the real car's whole fascinating story another time. The Purple Passion is also based on the 1951 Mercury and was created by the prolific and groundbreaking Larry Wood. Give that I was amazed by not only how good the Hirohata casting was but also by how much I liked it even though this sort of car is not usually my taste at all, this went straight on my list.

This is part of a 2025 seies called 'designed by' which seems to celebrate famous Hot Wheels designers, which is why he's specifically referenced on the side. As we can see below, the Purple Passion bears notable resemblance to the Hirohata car (2024 original colour scheme at the back, 2025 purple version on the left), but is also distinctly its own thing, not a copy but an interpretation; a cover version, not a rip off. I prefer the Hirohata Merc, but this is certainly an important design. It appeared in 1990 and from my count this 2025 release is the 138th version!

Third is a favourite of mine among fantasy cars, the Glory Chaser. Using styling cues from Italian and British sports racers of the late '50s and early '60s, this car channels Ferrari, Maserati, Aston Martin and Jaguar almost equally. I have been a lover of cars from this era ever since I first saw pictures of them in my childhood, and this seems to fit right in. I already have the 2022 first release in what Suzanne Vega would call Institution Green and the Gulf blue and orange from 2023 (perfect use of the livery) and I wasn't into the too-modern grey with original teal chrome wheels so I originally skipped this, intending to hold out for the orange one, but that never showed up around here. Poundland seems to have got some older stock in and I found I regretted the skip later despite my misgivings, and since my 1.8mm hex-shank drill bits arrived today, the first order of business when I got in was a wheel swap. Silver aerodiscs suit the grey much better, and I'm much happier with it; I can buy grey and turquoise as team colours now. The wheels went to the metallic teal Fiat 500e, which I've struggled to find good wheels for ever since I got it - I won't entertain those heinous TRAP5 things on anything other than futuristic hypercars.

The only licenced car among today's purchases is the 2022 Morgan Super 3, one of the most interesting interpretations of a 'track toy' I've yet seen. Mostly this type of car is a multi-million pound swoopy wedge with holes and wings and stuff and a kilohorse or two to throw it around. The Super 3 is radically different, aiming to provide a vintage racing experience that emphasises actual driving skill rather than speed and power. It's got a 1.5-litre Ford engine driving its single rear wheel and makes only 118 horsepower - but it weighs only a bit over 600kg, meaning it will likely be extremely nimble and with how low and exposed the driver is, the feel of the speed will likely feel considerably more viscerally real, raw and immediate than the average hypercar. A Morgan 4/4 is the #1 most wanted on my shortlist of cars I would actually like to own, and while I'd certainly like to try the Super 3 out it's not really my cup of tea. However as a Morgan lover I couldn't pass this up. I really hope we see more HW Morgans.

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Today I am pleased to present my most recent get: A 2023 Toyota GR Corolla, from Hot Wheels' late 2024 Premium series Slide Street 2, a series focused on pro drift vehicles.

To be exact, it's the Toyota GR Corolla driven by Ryan Tuerck in Formula Drift, and I got it because my wife and I recently traded our super-basic 2010 Toyota Aygo for a 2022 Corolla - not a GR, but miles more powerful and high-tech than the Aygo. I stand by the Aygo for what it is - a perfect first car, great for learning the basics of driving and how a car communicates with the driver at a fundamental level. However, a manual 1.0 with a single gauge and nothing more complex than aircon isn't ideal for commuting, and Mrs drives to work approx. 4 days a week, so when it failed its MOT due to corroded suspension suddenly showing up apparently everywhere at once, she decided that rather than repair it, she'd rather look for something, as she put it, "more swonky".

This is a really storied vehicle; to unpack what this really is, let's first talk about the Corolla in general. Now in this, its 12th generation, it's been the definition of dull reliability for a long, long time; the meme about buying a 90s Japanese car for a reliable car that will last forever is basically about the Corolla. But in 2017 Akio Toyoda jumped up and stated "No more boring cars!", which meant leaning on a different branch of the family tree.

The thing is, in Japan, the Corolla has always been both more fun and more than one car. Due to the curious parallel dealerships system many manufacturers in Japan operated, many of their product lines were split, with variants exclusive to one or the other dealership network. In Toyota's case they sold the Corolla through the Toyota Corolla Store, as you might expect, but also sold the Sprinter, a Corolla with mildly different bodywork, through another dealership nowadays known as Netz. In particular, the Corolla Levin (Spanish for lightning) was a sports version of the car, one that was only sold in Japan, and over at Netz, a sister car, the Sprinter Trueno (Spanish for thunder) was offered. Apparently from 2020 Toyota decided to unify them all and sell the same cars in all dealerships, which only took them 50 years. However, if you have any interest in cars you've almost certainly heard of the legendary AE86 Trueno Sprinter, the drifter's darling and circuit champion alike, a light and simple modestly priced coupe with near perfect weight distribution; it's a 5th gen Corolla.

That car (the sprinter Trueno, on the right) and its legacy are at the root of this, on the face of it, bizarre choice of drift car. But the other reason for this car is what it isn't. America, it appears, now hates sensibly sized cars, and so the Corolla, which to me is a medium sized family hatchback, is the smallest car Toyota sell there. Which means that over there, they don't sell their world-beating homologation car: the GR Yaris, WRC manufacturer's trophy winner three years running, driver's trophy winner two years running and top of the board so far this year too. The GR Corolla shares the hand-built 1.6litre 3-cylinder engine of the GR Yaris, which is interestingly smaller than the non-sports models (our base model is a 1.8-litre 4-cylinder hybrid, and a 2-litre is available - but not turbo'd up the wazoo like these GR boys are). The GR Corolla is an apology for that, basically, but it's one most enthusiasts seem keen to accept.

We'll come back to the GR Yaris another day, as it's one of my favourite cars on sale today; but for now my focus is this yellow peril. I'm not especially into drifting, but I do like cool cars, and this most recent iteration of a historically dull nameplate is definitely cool. I'd love to get the chase variant, which like our Corolla is glossy black, but that's not for car enthusiasts, it's for overpriced trade commodity enthusiasts...