The engineers at Hot Wheels can't just shrink down the real thing. Here's how they actually do it.
During the height of the muscle car craze of the 1960s, Mattel co-founder Elliot Handler wanted to create toys that better reflected what was going on in the burgeoning hot rodding scene. He hired Jack Ryan, an engineer who had previously worked on guided missile systems for Raytheon Technologies, and Harry Bentley Bradley, a car designer at General Motors, and gave them a simple task: Design a better toy car.
On the day before the 2022 Legends Tour made its stop at Mattel’s headquarters in El Segundo, California, the folks at Hot Wheels gavea chance to check out their design center to see how these iconic toy cars go from concept to reality. While it might be easy to assume that creating models is a relatively low-tech affair, the reality is that the company uses some sophisticated engineering to ensure that their products continue to meet the standard that was set 54 years ago.
For the Hot Wheels design team, it often comes down to identifying the elements that give the car its visual personality—the things that make a car look—and emphasizing those elements while potentially sacrificing less-important details due to the limitations of diecast manufacturing.From there the design is handed over to a computer-aided design modeler who further sculpts it using the Geomagic Touch X, a tool which was originally developed to train surgeons in medical schools.
The company not only makes a wide array of track set designs, they also produce different types of car-launching mechanisms, and a would-be production car needs to be able to reliably perform with all of them. And that means there are times when a sharp design might need to be sent back to the drawing board so that the team can produce a car that plays as good as it looks.
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