- Hot Wheels and Mercedes-Benz have unveiled a full-scale CLA art car.
- The design combines Mercedes luxury with Hot Wheels fantasy styling, featuring bold colours.
- A 1:64-scale diecast version of the CLA will launch in 2026 as part of Hot Wheels’ Legends Tour.
Hot Wheels has turned imagination into full-scale metal, unveiling a life-size Mercedes-Benz CLA art car at Los Angeles’ Race Service workshop.
Dubbed “Play Beyond Limits”, the one-off machine fuses Stuttgart sophistication with the wild exaggeration of childhood daydreams, including colossal diffusers, heroic spoilers and a paint job loud enough to wake your inner eight-year-old.
From dream garage to diecast
This collaboration marks the latest instalment of Mercedes-Benz’s Class of Creators programme, which gives designers and artists free rein to reinterpret its cars through their own lens.
For Hot Wheels, that meant taking the new CLA and dialling every feature to eleven.
The result channels classic 1:64-scale fantasy racers, finished in searing orange, pink and blue with cartoonish flame decals straight out of an ’80s poster.
The full-size artwork debuted ahead of its appearance at the Hot Wheels Legends Tour in El Segundo on October 4. It will later be immortalised in miniature, with a diecast CLA hitting shelves in 2026, bridging the gap between genuine automotive engineering and the make-believe universe that started it all.
Serious play
Hot Wheels says “Play Beyond Limits” is about rediscovering creativity through fun. “Playing unleashes potential, motivates and fosters innovation,” the brand notes, a sentiment echoed by countless enthusiasts who first fell for cars via a handful of tiny metal toys.
Class of creators, class of its own
Mercedes-Benz’s Class of Creators has already included projects with Ice Spice, Gustaf Westman and KidSuper.
The Hot Wheels CLA serves as its most flamboyant chapter yet, proof that when art, nostalgia, and performance collide, the result roars straight from the imagination.
