Hot Wheels x Mercedes-Benz Hits LA
Ever driven in LA? Then you’ll know that being behind the wheel is a pastime every Angeleno knows all too well. But on the evening of October 3rd, Race Service shifted perceptions on what driving through the City of Angels can mean. The workshop turned into a playground of neon nostalgia and adult-scale fantasy, hosting the unveiling of the Mercedes-Benz CLA art piece by Hot Wheels.
A few hours before the reveal, the space hummed with curated corners: retro game stations glowing in the half-light, lounges draped in colour, shelves stacked with mischievous merchandise. The mood blurred the line between art show and after-hours arcade. By the time the covers slipped off the car, guests were already somewhere between memory and make-believe.
The car itself was impossible to treat as just a car. Hot Wheels stretched the proportions into dream logic: spoilers gone operatic, diffusers as exaggerated as comic book ink, a body drenched in hyper-pigments of orange, pink, and electric blue. Flames raced across the shell like an echo of 1980s video culture. The CLA had always been an elegant, compact piece of engineering. That evening it was reborn as a toy made for imagination at one-to-one scale, a Hot Wheels hallucination with its DNA laid bare in fibreglass and lacquer.
Mercedes-Benz called this their fourth CLA collaboration in the Class of Creators series, which had already seen interventions from voices across music, fashion, and design. But Hot Wheels felt different. This was less about polish and more about play. The motto “Play Beyond Limits” sat everywhere—lit up on walls, folded into installations, etched into the tone of the night. The phrase worked as both mission and dare: an insistence that the culture of cars can still be unruly, a reminder that the fantasies of childhood still move the adult imagination.
The following morning, the story travelled east to El Segundo. Hot Wheels Legends Fest pulled the curtain wider, hosting the collaboration at Mattel HQ in front of crowds who treat car culture like mythology. Fans, builders, visionaries rolled up in their own creations, ready to celebrate not only the new CLA art piece but the decades-long loop of inspiration between Hot Wheels and the real automotive world. It was less product launch, more block party for the mechanically obsessed.
This one-off CLA isn’t staying only as a gallery relic. Hot Wheels confirmed a 1:64 die-cast will hit shelves in spring 2026, a miniature reincarnation of the oversized art car. It’s an inversion with its own irony: a toy company builds a life-size fantasy, only to shrink it back into a toy again. But that’s the point. The cycle of play refuses to end. Many guests spoke of their first spark for cars coming from those tiny models, those pocket-sized flames of possibility.
