The history of the world’s best-selling toy car, which has inspired kids to drag-race across the couch for five decades, began with an old-fashioned meet-cute.
It was in Denver in the early 1930s that Ruth Mosko, driving her brand-new ’32 Ford down the street, saw a young man with “dark, curly locks [who] captured her attention on sight.”
She again saw the man, Elliot Handler, at a charity dance soon after. “He looked at her like she was the one he had come to meet,” writes Kris Palmer in the new book “Hot Wheels: From 0 to 50 at 1:64 Scale” (Motorbooks), released this year to mark the brand’s 50th anniversary. “Dances were a nickel apiece, and Elliot borrowed from friends to monopolize Ruth all night.”
In addition to their romantic vibes, the two, both children of immigrants, were perfectly matched on a more practical level as well, with Mosko an aspiring businesswoman and Handler an artist looking to design practical products.
The couple married and moved to Los Angeles in 1958, and the next few years found them cycling through new businesses as Elliot made items like ashtrays and lamps that Ruth would sell.
‘Mattel had missed its chance by nearly a generation’
Renting out a tiny shop, they paired with investor Zachary Zemby to form Elzac, named for Elliot and Zachary. A friend of Elliot’s named Harold “Matt” Matson also worked for them around this time.
By 1944, Elzac had 300 employees and $2 million in annual sales, but Zemby and Handler weren’t getting along. So when Matson asked Handler if he could sell some of his designs, the couple and Matson left Elzac and formed Mattel — this time, for Matt and Elliot — with Matson.
The pairing with Matson was short-lived, but the name stuck. Over the next two decades, Elliot and Ruth built Mattel into the world’s largest toy company, largely on the strength of their 1959 introduction of the Barbie doll, created by Ruth and named after the couple’s daughter, Barbara.
While the Handlers were innovators in creating the first doll modeled after a young woman instead of a baby, they were late to the oversaturated toy-car market, which they didn’t consider until the mid-1960s.
Matchbox cars, made at 1/64 the scale of real cars, had been introduced in 1953 and were already an established hit with a slew of competitors. To the people in Mattel’s marketing department, “Mattel had missed its chance by nearly a generation.”
For Elliot, the desire to not only enter, but dominate, the toy-car market had a personal component. While he and Ruth owned the world’s most successful toy company, their grandson’s favorite toy was a car made by another company.
Elliot and Ruth HandlerAP
Elliot paired toy designers with engineers who’d worked for Chrysler, General Motors and other car companies. Finding the competition drab and uninspired, they developed a series of cars that “were brightly colored and ‘jacked up,’ with wide tires and mag wheels.”
Mattel also understood that kids wanted toy cars that were fast. Their competitors’ toys were not, because they used bulky steel rods as axles, which resulted in “rolling that was like a shopping cart at best.”
Earlier on, Mattel had tried to design a guitar that wouldn’t go out of tune. The project went nowhere due to costs, but the company had stocked up on pricey mandolin wire. A Mattel engineer realized that at 1/64 scale, mandolin wire was a speedy substitute for a car axle.
With “a smaller rolling surface and reduced friction against the wheel,” the wire, combined with plastic bearings and tapered wheels, made the new cars the toy equivalent of “The Fast and the Furious,” with company engineers claiming they could reach speeds of “200 mph.” The cars were colored with “bright, Spectraflame paint, which was applied over die-cast bodies without primer to allow the underlying zinc-plated metal to shine through.”
Mattel released the first 16 Hot Wheels models in 1968. Inspirations included the Camaro, the Corvette, the Firebird and even the bright yellow 1964 Chevy El Camino owned by one of the project’s designers.
The company’s marketing department predicted sales of 5 million cars the first year.
But after comparing a Matchbox car to a Hot Wheels car for a buyer from Kmart, and watching the Matchbox tumble off a track while the Hot Wheels car practically flew, they were stunned when Kmart placed an order for 50 million cars.
Hot Wheels are now the best-selling toy in the world, having sold their 4 billionth car this year. The company has created specialty versions modeled after everything from Spider-Man to Darth Vader to the Batmobile, which Mattel owns the rights to, and the company estimates that “10 Hot Wheels cars are purchased every second.”
But if there is one sign of Hot Wheels’ special place in our culture, it came courtesy of an unlikely source, billionaire Elon Musk, who shot a Hot Wheels car into space.
“In February 2018,” Palmer writes, “[Musk’s company] SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket topped with a cherry red Tesla Roadster, complete with a 1/64 scale Hot Wheels version of the roadster on its dashboard.”
