Review – Hot Wheels Fright Cars – Vulture Roadster
While poking through the Wal-Mart toy aisles recently I ran across these pumpkin head Hot Wheels packs and just had to snag a couple of them. I love how the guys behind the Hot Wheels series create holiday-themed sets, even if the sets are usually twice to price of a normal Hot Wheels car. Today we’re looking at the Vulture Roadster, an asymetrical design that’s just crazy enough to be one of those types of Hot Wheels cars that I love; mainly, something you don’t expect to see on the road.
Packaging
What can I say that you can’t see for yourself in the above photo? It’s obviously a Halloween set, which automatically makes it a collectible for those of you who love to grab Halloween stuff. It’s attractive, clearly shows the toy car, and does everything a toy’s package needs to do. While I would have liked to have seen some uniqueness to each pack’s card art I can understand that these special themed sets have to share cards in order to keep costs low. I don’t like it, but I understand.
Roadster is Radical!
The Hot Wheels wiki tells us that this is the tenth release of this design, which means that this mold has seen some mileage. Still, regardless of its age this is one sweet ride and looks insane, with a giant pipe along one side of the car giving it its unusual appearance. I’m not sure how the driver sees past that massive set of pipes, but I don’t really care since it looks fantastic.
As with other Hot Wheels cars, the Vulture Roadster is made of plastic and metal, giving the car a healthy heft that sets it apart from dollar store toy cars. In this instance the chassis is plastic while the black chunk of the body is metal, with the bright green parts cast out of plastic. A good part of the car’s weight is that huge pipe (see above) which is also made out of metal. Even thought this comes in at twice the price of most Hot Wheels cars it still feels like a good deal; these things are just that heavy.
FAST!
And that weight comes into play once you start rolling the car across the floor. While I may not have any Hot Wheels tracks to run the cars on — despite Gina’s best efforts to convince me to buy a set of track so that we can race the cars — this thing performs nicely on the “shove it across the floor” test. Not the fastest Hot Wheels car I’ve seen so far, but a respectable speed.
Maybe we do need one of those tracks here at home so we can give these cars a proper speed test.
Printed Design
The sides of the car are decorated with a green flaming wolf pattern and the Hot Wheels logo superimposed over a pumpkin. Suitably Halloween-flavored, and an excellent example of the tampo process used to decorate these cars (if you care, the Hot Wheels wiki has a page describing the process).
Closing Thoughts
It’s a Hot Wheels car, so if you collect those then there’s a good chance you already own one of these. It’s not the strangest design I’ve seen, but it looks odd enough that it passed my “hey, that looks weird” test, which is what matters when I’m buying a Hot Wheels car. I won’t collect all of the Fright Cars series, but I’ll grab a few of the stranger designs.
Philip Reed would stick around and chat but it’s time for him to hit the road. Gotta race some pumpkins tonight.
Yep, definitely need a track to test all your cars….