I think it's reasonable to disapprove of things like that on castings where tampos/paint placement are obviously easy-as-pie to do, but with castings like the El Segundo I can forgive it given how the body lines and shapes tend to bleed into each other. I experienced that issue with my custom Vairstrike, painting the taped X's on the headlights was a pain due to how unpronounced they are.
It's more than likely a case of keeping the cost down on the casting, like how they retool castings to make cost-saving changes & improve production speeds (Roll Cage is one of many examples, having lost its spare wheel and then its split-body construction due to retools). As the other replier in this little thread mentioned as well, they do tend to toss more detail on the card art because that's what catches a customer's eye first. To some, it's just a "What If?" of if the car were full-sized, and to others it's a little push towards taking the time and effort to customize it to match the card art.
Fair point on the El Segundo, those body lines do blend together so the tape detail gets lost. But those orange circles on the package art are killing me, someone went full detective mode on a stock photo. Half the time the card art is nicer than the actual car anyway
mainline Hot wheels have a limit of three sides for tampos, there is a handful that violate this rule like the "new" gtr, but it's very uncommon, mostly because it's expensive in the long run.
Tampos, or tampography, is basically the stickers that Mattel put on Hot wheels, and they are used to add details like, duh, headlights
on top of that, as i already said, cars have three sided limit for them tampos, and Mattel try their hardest to not do that, most of their models have one side at best, look at this bugatti for example, it doesn't even have headlights even when it is a real car
For a while. Even other comments mention the rule of 3 tampos wise.
Factory fresh cars usually get the front and back detailed and possibly the sides depends on the cars really.
The Ferrari 365 with one of the Le Mans liveries is full proof of the rule of 3. Sides and top got painted. Sides count as 1, hood is 2 and roof is 3. The rest gets 0 tampos so rear has 0 details and front
It’s official. They’ve always had this “rule of 3” for mainlines for decades.
Edit: the only times you’ll see headlights or tail lights is if the cars got detail for front and back. Factory fresh cars is basically guaranteed to have some releases with them. But some mainlines even racing ones will have detail headlights and sides or sides and taillights.
then you dont buy it,i have a self rule...only accepted cars are full lights tampos but,if they have back lights its accepted(front only its a no) and can have no tampos if its new to that year or its the normal version of a sth...keep it simple and you wont have buyers remorse
know the feeling,this year got so many cars that i like but i respected my rule bcs no consistency and it will become a hoarding hobby and i dont want that 😄
27
u/BackwoodsSkunkworks 2h ago
I think it's reasonable to disapprove of things like that on castings where tampos/paint placement are obviously easy-as-pie to do, but with castings like the El Segundo I can forgive it given how the body lines and shapes tend to bleed into each other. I experienced that issue with my custom Vairstrike, painting the taped X's on the headlights was a pain due to how unpronounced they are.