Hot Wheels Zamacs - A brief history

Have you heard of Zamacs? They're more often spelled ZAMACs because its an acronym for Zinc, Aluminium, MAgnesium and Copper. They are often unpainted variations of the mainline cars. In the United States, these are exclusive to Walmarts. Eve though they are unpainted, baremetal variations, they will carry some minimal deco and colors.

When did they start?

Hot Wheels has had baremetal cars much before ZAMACs started as an official line of castings, sold exclusively at walmarts. This official lineup started in 2013. A mix of 18 cars per year, spread throughout the year in six cases, in assortments of 3 castings per case. This tradition of 18 cars ran from 2013 to 2022. 2022 marked the 10 year anniversary of Zamacs and the cars had a special Zamac 10 Years deco. Very many beautiful and highly sought after models would pop every now and then, like a 55 Chevy Bel Air Gasser or a Honda Civic or a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta or a Datsun 510 Bluebird Wagon to mention a few, keeping the enthusiasm resh among collectors. The only flipside to this was with bad distribution issues, 18 castings every year was becoming too much of a number for collectors to keep up with. Most folks would often resort to secondary markets like ebay and facebook pages to source their collection.

What happened in 2023?

In 2023, this marking the 11th year of Zamacs, Mattel switched things up a bit. They reduced the Walmart Exclusive count from 18 to 12. So now instead of 3 castings across 6 different cases, it became 2 castings across 6 different cases. But in addition to this basic, mainline variation, Mattel brought out 6 pack Zamacs, as exclusives, to the Legends Tour. This 6 pack started in 2022 so that year had a total of  18+6=24 Zamac castings, although in 2022, the distribution was not streamlined enough to make this exclusive to Legends Tour shippers and was found in a lot of non mianstream retail outlets.

The new distribution of zamacs castings across basic cases is as follows. 

2024Assortment2025
CZinger 21CBMazda Autozam
Mighty KBCustom 53 Chevy
57 Jeep FCESubaru BRZ
McLaren Solus GTEJeep Wagoneer
92 Honda Civic EGHBMW 2002
Mustang Funny CarH55 Chevy
94 Audi Avant RS2KPunk Rod
55 Chevy Bel Air GasserKCadillac Project GTP Hypercar
Mercedes Benz Unimog 1300LMLand Rover Defender 90
90 Acura NSXM17 Ford F150 Raptor
67 Ford GT40 Mk IVQJaguar XJC V12 Coupe
Lamborghini Sesto ElementoQVolvo 240 Drift Wagon

 As you can see, this has been consistent for two years now, unlike Red Editions that have occurred in different cases that last year's.

I have always found this site as a great reference for zamacs.

https://www.billjohn.com/hotwheels/zamac/index.htm 

Do you collect zamacs? Whats your favorite casting? What are some of the castings you'd like to see as Zamacs? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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