

There were sixteen castings released, eleven of them designed by Harry Bentley Bradley with assistance from Handler and Ryan. These were the first of the Red Line Series, named for the tires which had a red pin stripe on their sides. The first line of Hot Wheels Cars, known as The Original Sweet 16 was manufactured in 1967. He began producing the cars with assistance from fellow engineer Jack Ryan. Hot Wheels were originally conceived by Handler to be more like " hot rod" cars (i.e., customized/modified or even caricaturized or fantasy cars, often with big rear tires, Superchargers, flame paint-jobs, outlandish proportions, hood blowers, etc.), as compared to Matchbox cars which were generally small-scale models of production cars.


Handler discovered his son Kenneth playing with Matchbox cars and decided to create a line to compete with Matchbox. The original Hot Wheels were made by Elliot Handler. Although Hot Wheels were originally intended to be for children and young adults, they have become popular with adult collectors, for whom limited edition models are now made available. Many automobile manufacturers have since licensed Hot Wheels to make scale models of their cars, allowing the use of original design blueprints and detailing. It was the primary competitor of Matchbox until Mattel bought its owner Tyco Toys in 1997. Hot Wheels is an American brand of scale model cars invented by Elliot Handler and introduced by his company Mattel on May 18, 1968. For other purposes, see Hot Wheels (disambiguation).
