Hot Wheels collectors are always looking to the future, what’s coming up next and what lies beyond that. We’re often so concerned with what the next big thing is, that we forget to stop and look at what we already have. So before I begin to say where I think the Hot Wheels Fast & Furious Premium Series should go and the cars that they should do next, let’s stop and take a moment to look at the cars we’ve already seen.
The Fast and Furious Premium Series has provided us with so many cool cars, including over 20 new castings! This article would be a quarter-mile long if I talked about each and every Fast & Furious car, so today I’m just going to concentrate on the cars we’ve seen from the first movie, The Fast and The Furious (2001).
From Dom’s original team, we’ve seen Dom’s Mazda RX7, Letty’s Nissan S14 Silvia, Jesse’s Volkswagen Jetta and Leon’s Nissan Skyline R33.
Dom’s 1970 Chevy Chevelle and 1970 Dodge Charger.
Brian’s Mitsubishi Eclipse, Ford F-150 Lightning and Toyota Supra.
Johnny Tran’s Honda S2000, the white Mazda RX7 which Letty raced against at Race Wars and a BMW E36 which appears in the background of the Race Wars scene.
Additional photos by Sam (aka @64wheels)
Hot Wheels Premium consistently produces way more hits than misses, and this series is no exception. There’s a few cars here that could be improved upon, but overall they’re really nice. The one thing that lets some of them down a bit are the wheel choices, but I think Hot Wheels did the best with what they had at the time. In 2019, when the Fast and Furious Premium Series began, they were just starting to develop “Modern” style Real Riders designs and the range they had was limited. I’m sure we’ll continue to see Hot Wheels bring out more new wheel styles, and once they have a more accurate wheel available they can do a re-release.
Out of the 12 cars that we’ve seen from the first F&F movie, 5 of them were brand new castings and 3 more were new Premium re-tools!
The new Premium castings that Hot Wheels have been making recently are amazing, they’re of a much higher quality and with finer details than the Premium castings we had a decade ago, so I’m excited any time Hot Wheels brings out a new Premium casting. And the great thing about the new castings is that once they’re made, they’re in the repertoire to be used in other non-F&F series.
There’s two cars here which are a bit of a letdown in my opinion, and unfortunately they’re arguably the two most famous cars in the Fast & Furious movie franchise: Dom’s Dodge Charger and Brian’s Supra. Those castings were originally developed for the Mainline and were later modified for Premium, and they lack in the details that we’ve become used to. The detail of the exposed engine on the Charger doesn’t hold up as a Premium casting, and on the Supra, it’s the tampo work that lets it down. The Premium version lacks the details that were present on the Basics version from 2013, most notably the textured hood vents and silver rear wing, it also suffers from a inaccurate wheel choice. The silver lining is that these two cars haven’t been released individually in the F&F Premium Series, and maybe the reason that they haven’t is because Hot Wheels is remedying these issues behind the scenes.
There’s also Brian’s Eclipse which would be more screen-accurate if it weren’t missing the logo on the hood, and Dom’s Chevelle which I feel could use larger rear wheels. But these are very minor issues and don’t detract from the cars too much.
An interesting vehicle choice is the black BMW E36, a car which only appears in the movie for a few fleeting seconds. I find it bizarre that Hot Wheels would choose to make this car when there’s a very similar BMW E36 which features in a more prominent role in the sequel movie, 2 Fast 2 Furious.
A cool thing about the Fast & Furious Premium Series is that the future releases for the series are right there in front of us on the movie screen. We can see exactly what’s coming up in the series. We might not know when, but if a car has been in a Fast & Furious movie, there’s a chance that Hot Wheels will make it one day.
It’s fun to watch the movies and hypothesise about which cars could be coming out soon, and imagining what they’d look like in Hot Wheels form. That’s what I did while watching The Fast and The Furious a few weeks ago, and I actually compiled a few cars from that movie that I’d like to see in the Hot Wheels series. I’ll share that with you in the next part!
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They’ve never released the Supra as a single premium just yet! Also, they also never released the maroon Superbird as apremium at all… but they always keep releasing the SAME models over and over and over,………………
They never released the Supra as a premium single AND never ever released the maroon Superbird
as a premium!.. BUT, they keep releasing the same models over and over and over and over, ………………
That’s a great rundown of all the FF1 cars! I also think this compilation shows that there’ve been some brilliant models (the S14 is STUNNING, as are the SVT Lightning and Jetta) and some terrible ones, but the most disappointing to me is the Supra. The tampo printing, the lack of details (especially when considering the basic F&F series release from 2013 was way more detailed), the wrong wheels… it’s just a mess. By comparison, I find the Charger to be much more decent.
Another note I’d like to make is on the BMW. I love having a black E36 M3 in premium, but picking such a random background vehicle is just bizarre to me (and this argument applies to most other background cars so far) when there was a perfectly acceptable version in 2F2F. It’s also not the best looking casting for an E36 M3, and for all the gazillion Skylines and Mustangs Hot Wheels keeps doing, a retool of this one would do wonders. In fact, I’d really rather prefer seeing a fixed version of this car WITH MIRRORS and a proper bodykit. Then, even if they redo this exact background movie car, I would be fine with it, just on the virtue of having a nice, satisfying E36 M3.