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Whether you are a kid or an adult, you’ve most likely grown up with these little Hot Wheels cars, and for most of us, these made out childhood better.
The Hot Wheels diecast cars can be considered both toys for kids, as well as collectibles for people that want to build up a nice wall of their favourite cars.
Surprisingly or not, these little Hot Wheels cars are replicated, and even though it’s mainly the popular and rare cars that are replicated, there’s many fake cars floating on the market.
In fact, when you want to buy one or more Hot Wheels diecast vehicles, it is pretty important to know which toy car is fake, and which one is real.
To put it shortly, the fastest way to spot fake Hot Wheels toy cars (diecast) is by checking packaging and the details on the bottom side of the car. Most of the fake Hot Wheels toy cars present flaws when it comes to the packaging’s inscriptions, and when it comes to the bottom of the cars, the fake ones either miss the correct inscriptions or there are no inscriptions at all, which automatically makes a fake Hot Wheels piece.
For the first step fo teh guide on how to spot fake Hot Wheels cars, we are going to have a look at the packaging box of these cars.
We’re starting the guide with this step because as mentioned before, we like to believe that this is the best way to spot fake Hot Wheels cars at the first look, just by looking at their packaging.
Yep, this might seem like something extremely obvious, but sometimes obvious flaws hide in plain sight and we just skip over them by mistake.
The image with teh real vs fake Hot Wheels packagings above shows you how the replica manufacturers forgot to add a letter in the Hot Wheels logo.
In fact, the fake item’s “HotWheels” logo is spelt as “HotWheel”, therefore missing the letter “s” at the end of the word.
On the other hand, the authentic Hot Wheels packaging has the full and the perfectly spelt logo, as it is mentioned as “HotWheels”, as it has to be spelt.
Again, as simple as it may seem to spot a fake car, make sure that you double check the “HotWheels” logo that’s written on the box.
The image above shows you a fake car that’s not even labeled as Hot Wheels, but the things is that if you don’t carefully check this, you can be easily tricked into thinking that you’ve gotten a real Hot Wheels car just because the logo looks like the real one, even though it isn’t the real one.
Proceeding to the second step of the guide on how to spot fake Hot Wheels diecast, we’re going to stay still on the packaging, but this time we want to go a bit deeper on the boxes.
In the image with the authentic vs replica Hot Wheels toy cars above, we have pointed out how the fake item is missing the inscription regarding the car.
The authentic Hot Wheels cars must have information about the car’s brand of manufacturing, the name of the model and the year of manufacturing written somewhere on the box.
In fact, you can see how the authentic image mentions it all: there’s a 1974 Brazilian Dodge charger.
On the other hand, the replica Hot Wheels car doesn’t have any inscription about the year, the brand and the name of the model of the car that’s inside the package.
Going to the third step of teh guide on how to spot a fake Hot Wheels cars, we are now going to flip the cars over, and there we want to see if there’s any sort of inscriptions.
All of the genuine Hot Wheels cars are labeled on their rear side, and if you look at any real Hot Wheels car, you will notice that they say a few things.
First of all, you can observe how the fake car in the image with the real vs fake Hot Wheels cars above has no inscription at all, and how the real one has quite a few of these.
The genuine Hot Wheels toy cars must have the Hot Wheels logo, the car’s manufacturer and model, the country of manufacturing, year of when the car was made, as well as the code of the year in which it was crafted.
The fourth step of the guide on how to legit check Hot Wheels cars, we are going to move back to the packaging of the cars, and we are now going to see what is it about the number which indicates what item out of how many were there in the collection.
So as to make this clearer, let’s quickly look at the fake vs real Hot Wheels image below.
Looking at this picture with the real vs replica Hot Wheels image above, you can see how the authentic item’s stating the fact that the 1965 Ford Galaxie in the box is the 10th out of 10th cars in that specific collection.
On the other hand, you can see how the fake Hot Wheels car’s packaging says none of that, as there is missing the collection number on the box.
The steps we’ve written so far are the best ways to authenticate this item.
The next few steps are still reliable signs of authenticity but are for non-top-versions of replicas available for this item. We recommend sticking to the steps we’ve explained above to make sure you’re not drawing the wrong conclusions.
There are many authentic Hot Wheels cars that have a few mistakes on them, and whether that is the car being scratched, cracked or generally not at the best of its quality, this does happen on the real Hot Wheels products as well.
This image shows you how an authentic Hot Wheels cars has a crack on the roof – yep, that’s something you’d see on the real products sometimes.
Errors like that above happen from time to time when the lack of the quality service from Hot Wheels happens, but once again, you won’t have to deal with this on many cars.
No need to worry if there’s a sticker on the case spelt in Chinese or in any other language – that means that your Hot Wheels packaging is an imported one that comes from outside of the country.
That is why we have compiled this quick 30 seconds solution to authenticating your Hot Wheels cars. Below are the top 4 indicators that can help you determine if you have a fake or real Hot Wheels car.
If you need help with the authentication of your Hot Wheels cars, we’ve got you covered.
All you have to do is send us high-quality pictures of your Hot Wheels cars and we will get back to you with the results within 24 to 48 hours. The results will also come with a report on why we believe your item is fake or authentic.
That brings us to the end of our guide on how to spot fake vs real Hot Wheels cars. We will continue to update this article as better and newer comparisons are put out.
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Thank you for reading this,
Ch Daniel and Ch David
