This is the Hot Wheels x MoMA Jaguar E-Type Roadster, it’s a faithful 1:64 scale die cast replica of the now legendary E-Type that’s part of MoMA’s (the Museum of Modern Art’s) permanent collection.
The E-Type has been called the most beautiful car ever made, and it’s not hard to see why, even Enzo Ferrari was apparently a fan. Later versions of the car lost some of the magic of the original design, which is perhaps why the museum has an early Series 1 version in their keep.
Each car comes in an acrylic display case with a design that references MoMA’s gallery presentation of the actual car. A slide-out drawer in the base holds a booklet about the vehicle, and the case itself ships inside a slipcover and a decorative outer box. Image courtesy of Mattel.
History Speedrun: The MoMA Jaguar E-Type
After the Museum of Modern Art began collecting automobiles, initially with the acquisition of a Cisitalia 202 in 1972, its curators developed a wish-list of 10 to 12 cars. The Jaguar E-Type was right at the top. Then in 1996, MoMA finally obtained one.
Jaguar donated a 1963 Series 1 roadster, finished in Opalescent Dark Blue with a folding fabric top, and it became only the third automobile to enter MoMA’s collection – the aforementioned Cisitalia came first in 1972, a 1990 Ferrari Formula 1 car was then added in 1994. Jaguar sourced the car from a private collector in what the museum described as pristine condition and donated it outright.
Terence Riley, then Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, was very open about why the E-Type had led the list: “Because of the E-type’s beauty and sculptural quality, its functionality, and its seminal impact on overall car design, it perfectly suits the criteria of a landmark design object.”
The car carries object number 113.1996 in the Architecture and Design collection, formally credited to three people – Sir William Lyons, William M. Heynes, and Malcolm Sayer. The shape is Sayer’s of course.
Sayer had come to Jaguar from the Bristol Aeroplane Company, where he had spent the war years working on aircraft including the Blenheim light bomber and Beaufighter heavy fighter. He described himself as an aerodynamicist, not a stylist, and the E-Type’s design process was based on aerodynamics rather than aesthetics. It just so happened to be wildly aesthetic because it was so aerodynamic.
Rather than relying on conventional styling methods, Sayer combined preliminary work with a mathematical approach – he applied complex formulas to calculate the ellipses governing the car’s outline and specific external details, starting from four fixed engineering parameters: height, length, width, and ground clearance.
This is the new Hot Wheels x MoMA Jaguar E-Type Roadster, it’s a faithful 1:64 scale die cast replica of the now legendary E-Type that is part of MoMA’s (the Museum of Modern Art’s) permanent collection. Image courtesy of Mattel.
Tom Jones (no, not that Tom Jones), who worked in Jaguar’s styling department, told MoMA curator Christopher Mount that Sayer “kept his mathematical formula for design a secret and in fact died before anyone else learned it.”
Scale models of the proposed shape of the new E-Type were tested in a wind tunnel from multiple directions, including to study the effects of crosswinds – this was unusually thorough aerodynamic work for a production car of the period. The result was uninterrupted lines from virtually every angle, the bumpers were minimal, the door handles had a teardrop form, the headlights were glass-covered on early cars, and the wheels were noticeably recessed within the chassis.
The engineering that underpinned the car drew on Jaguar’s wildly successful C-Type and D-Type racing programs from the 1950s. The front suspension, disc brakes, and rack-and-pinion steering were all carried over, while the E-Type’s semi-monocoque body, with it’s front subframe, were evolutions of the structure of the D-Type.
Malcolm Sayer designed the bodies of all three cars, the C-Type, the D-Type, and the E-Type, and looking at the cars next to each other the design progression is clear to see.
Between them, the C-Type and D-Type cars gave Jaguar five outright 24 Hours of Le Mans victories from 1951 to 1957. The independent rear suspension used on the E-Type was Bob Knight’s work, refined through the E1A and E2A prototypes.
The 3.8 liter twin-cam inline-six made 265 bhp at 5,500 rpm and 260 lb ft of torque. MoMA’s own catalogue gives the 3.8 liter E-Type Roadster a top speed of 149.1 mph; production examples straight from the factory generally peaked in the high 140s according to period testing, and the 0 to 60 mph time was 7.1 seconds.
The museum mounted an exhibition around the acquisition of the E-Type in April of 1996 titled “Refining the Sports Car: Jaguar’s E-Type,” which ran through August of that year. Alongside the car, the show presented a separate E-Type engine, original engineering drawings, and photo panels from the C- and D-Type programs.
This is the Hot Wheels x MoMA Jaguar E-Type Roadster, it’s a 1:64 die-cast car that was produced through a collaboration between Mattel and the Museum of Modern Art, and released as part of the first of seven designs the two organizations will be launching. Image courtesy of Mattel.
Four other exhibitions have included it since: AUTObodies in 2002, a collection survey in 2006 t0 2007, a chronological collection presentation in 2016 to 2017, and Automania, which ran from July of 2021 through to January of 2022.
The Hot Wheels x MoMA Jaguar E-Type Roadster
This is the Hot Wheels x MoMA Jaguar E-Type Roadster, it’s a 1:64 die-cast car that was produced through a collaboration between Mattel and the Museum of Modern Art, and released as part of the first of seven designs the two organizations will be launching.
The model is directly based on the 1963 Series 1 roadster MoMA has held in its Architecture and Design collection since 1996, as outlined above, it specifically references that car’s appearance in the museum’s 2021 to 2022 Automania exhibition.
At $45, it’s well above Hot Wheels’ standard retail price point, this is because the body is ZAMAC rather than the plastic used on most current-generation Hot Wheels cars, finished in opalescent dark blue to match the museum car, with a full-metal chassis in the same color.
The hood opens to show off a molded CK straight-six, the wheels are custom Real Riders, the windscreen is smoke-tinted, and the interior is black. The base is marked “1963 Jaguar E-Type Roadster.
This model is directly based on the 1963 Series 1 roadster MoMA has held in its Architecture and Design collection since 1996, as outlined above, it specifically references that car’s appearance in the museum’s 2021 to 2022 Automania exhibition. Image courtesy of Mattel.
Each car comes in an acrylic display case with a design that references MoMA’s gallery presentation of the actual car. A slide-out drawer in the base holds a booklet about the vehicle, and the case itself ships inside a slipcover and a decorative outer box.
It’s now available to buy direct from Mattel here, and at the time of writing it’s still in stock and available to order.
Images courtesy of Mattel
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
