The Energon Pub

For some reason, Mattel has decided to make their first Transformers Hotwheels car, Bumblebee, massively shortpacked. How shortpacked? Well the 2024 mainline has 250 non exclusive cars, and they come split in 15 waves/cases throughout the year. As with most cars, Bumblebee will only appear in 2 of those waves but each time he will be 1 in 72.
That means that in each case he's in, he will be on par in rarity with the standard Treasure Hunt cars. And looking at it from an entire year's output, he will be 2 out of 1080. That makes the Hotwheels Bumblebee car the rarest standard car from the 2024 set, which is not a Treasure Hunt car.

For those unaware, Treasure Hunt cars are those which are at most 1 per case and will not repeat in a following case (so at most 1 out of 1080 if you buy every case of 72 cars in a given year).

With both Transformers fans and Hotwheels fans interested in this collectible, Bumblebee could become quite the hot commodity. Especially since this would be the very first release in a growing collection of Hotwheels Transformers cars. So, for those wondering which other cars are in the same waves as Bumblebee, we have videos of the cases below.

Dang, looks like it will be difficult.
I'm more hyped for this than the hotwheels version of g1 toy Optimus.

Day 1623 of waiting for Transformers Armada Masterpiece news.

Soi glad I have no desire to get these. Hotwheels fans are ruthless. Going to be interesting if these ever actually show up in a store.

Yeah, I'll keep an eye out and if I spot it I'll buy it, but I'm not a big collector of HW in general so if I can't find it oh well. It's a neat niche item to have but not worth any hassle.

I suspect that if the employees don't snatch it ups first the early bird HW collectors will be there first thing.

Till-all-R1 wrote:Yeah, I'll keep an eye out and if I spot it I'll buy it, but I'm not a big collector of HW in general so if I can't find it oh well. It's a neat niche item to have but not worth any hassle.

I suspect that if the employees don't snatch it ups first the early bird HW collectors will be there first thing.

My local dollar store gets stuff half a year late but the employees dont care. So today I actually found a treasure hunt item. Will probably see this bumblebee at the beginning of next year

Emerje wrote:I'm really hoping that the only reason it's rare is to get people talking (like we are) and they plan on doing many other releases later on, maybe even in a multipack with those other cars that were listed but haven't been revealed yet.

william-james88 wrote:

Till-all-R1 wrote:Yeah, I'll keep an eye out and if I spot it I'll buy it, but I'm not a big collector of HW in general so if I can't find it oh well. It's a neat niche item to have but not worth any hassle.

I suspect that if the employees don't snatch it ups first the early bird HW collectors will be there first thing.

My local dollar store gets stuff half a year late but the employees dont care. So today I actually found a treasure hunt item. Will probably see this bumblebee at the beginning of next year

I was reading an article recently about things you didn't know about Dollar Tree and one of the things they said was that it isn't uncommon for them hand over a HW case to whoever shows up first as long as they put the cars they don't want on the pegs for them in return. What an unexpected dichotomy, usually you hear about HW buyers being a nuisance.

Emerje

Every collector after about six months has at least one HW collector story.

Been watching eBay and he is selling pretty quickly for $20 a pop. Since we posted this it has gone up to $27.

Emerje wrote:I was reading an article recently about things you didn't know about Dollar Tree and one of the things they said was that it isn't uncommon for them hand over a HW case to whoever shows up first as long as they put the cars they don't want on the pegs for them in return. What an unexpected dichotomy, usually you hear about HW buyers being a nuisance.

Emerje

Interesting, when I worked retail this was not something that would be allowed by the bigger chains. Sure a customer could look through a box of product If they so choose to, but not put product away on the shelf. That is your job as an employee.

Till-all-R1 wrote:

Emerje wrote:I was reading an article recently about things you didn't know about Dollar Tree and one of the things they said was that it isn't uncommon for them hand over a HW case to whoever shows up first as long as they put the cars they don't want on the pegs for them in return. What an unexpected dichotomy, usually you hear about HW buyers being a nuisance.

Emerje

Interesting, when I worked retail this was not something that would be allowed by the bigger chains. Sure a customer could look through a box of product If they so choose to, but not put product away on the shelf. That is your job as an employee.

It's cause Dollar Tree has next to no enforced policy for stuff like that. They don't even have enough workers to man the store, so anyone showing up and volunteering to put stuff away is given an ok from the staff there.

o.supreme wrote:Soi glad I have no desire to get these. Hotwheels fans are ruthless. Going to be interesting if these ever actually show up in a store.

After looking into it, I kinda get it. We’d be just as ruthless if a TF we wanted was 1 per case of 72 (or 1 per 5 cases of 72)

We’ve seen several Transformers Hotwheels toys already but all were part of another Hotwheels line. Well now we have images for a subline dedicated to Transformers. There are a few odd bits about it though, so these images from Instagram might be fake.
While these are cars of Transformers alt modes from live action media, the Transformers characters are not named, nor are they shown on the art. Instead, each pack simply has the name of the car with standard evergreen Transformers art, not reflective of the product, making them a lot less interesting to collect for MISC collectors.

Still, if real this would be another way to get Bumblebee, which is rare in the mainline.

The « characters » in this subline are Crosshairs, Bumblebee, Stinger, Drift and Barricade.

Not a fan of the packaging, but it's super cool to see movie alt modes in Hot Wheels! RPMs are kinda back xD

Will definitely try and track down the Bayverse ones!

The Transforming diecast Optimus Prime we got a few weeks ago was really cool, but all of these seem really low effort. These are diecast molds Mattel already had, painted in movie colors and stuck to generic evergreen packaging. They didn't even bother to put the character name on the card.

They look nice!

I like seeing Crosshairs here, I kinda hoped that he would become the standard version of the character, like how Barricade became a recurring Decepticon.

We need someone to make custom blister cards featuring thr actual character art for Crosshairs, Drift, Barricade, and Stinger. That Bee looks weird, though.

Hotwheels Bumblebee is supposed to be out soon in the US (if not already out). The toy has been found in Canada. It was found at Maxi/Real Canadian Superstore in Quebec. It is packed one per case of 72.

We also got wind of an upcoming variant meant to come out later in the year, thanks to an ebay listing. This is a gold variant. This is not a chase or rarer release. It will be a regular release within the same year in a later case.

Emerje wrote:I think I've seen that wave at Target, or at least I'd seen that wheelchair and blue truck, not sure if they're part of that wave. My local Walmart hasn't stocked the Hot Wheels in months.

I said before that there was no way they were only doing one Bumblebee and I'm glad I'm right. Not sure why the one everyone would want is the chase and Goldbug is the regular release, that feels like a major oversight.

Emerje

Neither are chase, both are regular releases found in more than one wave/case

Also cases always repeat new cars from the previous case so its not a sure thing that you got this BB case or the previous one.

I have not found info on this BB case found at US retail yet. Just specialty stores at a markup

Emerje wrote:

william-james88 wrote:Neither are chase, both are regular releases found in more than one wave/case

How ridiculous are Hot Wheels packouts if 1 out of every 72 isn't considered a chase? That sounds like anything but "regular".

Emerje

Chase is 1 out of every 72 and only found in one case. Both these Bumblebees will be featured in more than one case. So those arent chase, they are regular releases.

What's chase is this car for instance. It's in the first case of 2024, only packed one per case and won't be found in any other case after that, even though you need it to complete the 2024 set (it's numbered 8 out of 250). So that's a chase.



These Bumblebees will get repacked in the following case. So even if they are 1 out of 72 in each of their two cases, they are at least two times more easy to find than any of the chase releases this year (below is a list):

https://hotwheels.fandom.com/wiki/2024_ ... nts_Series

Emerje wrote:I don't know, it sounds insane to me that 1 out of 72 is a chase, but 2 out of 144 isn't. It makes even less sense when a particular store could put out one of the two Bumblebee cases and two of the police car case and your own odds are exactly the same regardless. Their benchmark for what is a chase and what isn't razor thin because it assumes every store gets every case when some stores go many months without restocking. I've been watching the Hot Wheels aisle at Walmart since these were first announced and they haven't put any new stock out since and the selection was already very thin.

Emerje

Your math isnt right there. When looking at 2 consecutive cases as you are doing, a chase is 1/144 since it wont repeat while BB (a non chase) is 2/144. So a chase remains twice more rare in the grand scheme of things.
Looking at your Walmart example, if they dont stock one of the cases with BB, then you still have a chance they stock the other case he’s in while you have absolutely no chance of getting the chase since they skipped that one case, and thus must buy it on the secondary market at whatever markup.

In an entire year’s assortment, BB in standard yellow will appear 2/1080 cars while a chase like that police car will appear only 1/1080. He remains the rarest non chase, but he’s still not a chase.