The BMW M2 Exemplifies My Mixed Feeling About The Silver Series

The Hot Wheels Silver Series has been a mixed bag so far.  Some sets have been so hot that they barely appear on shelves, while others have languished for months with little turnover.  I can never quite make sense of how to feel about this line, as it’s nice to have more new models being released, and the higher budget for printed detailing is nice, but the models released in the Silver Series are so often made worse by their “upgrades” over the mainline version.  The new yellow BMW M2 is a perfect example. 

It’s no secret that the BMW M2 casting is among the coolest BMW castings in the Hot Wheels lineup.  Not only is the casting itself great looking, but this generation M2 is one of the coolest enthusiast cars BMW has made in the last decade.  The debut mainline version in blue was epic, as was the clean red recolor that followed, but since then we’ve seen a variety of ugly decos and graphics that ruin the look of the car, at least to my eyes. 

Seven years after those clean blue and red versions, we finally have another clean recolor, thanks to the Silver Series.  This is one of the things I like about the Silver Series – it allows us to get more versions of cool castings than we otherwise would.  

Unfortunately, the Silver Series versions so often end up feeling like downgrades over their mainline counterparts, which is odd given the extra budget allocated to them.  In the case of this M2, I’m glad Hot Wheels resisted the urge to add extraneous graphics to the side, as the stock look fits this car much better.  The only extra detailing compared to the mainline versions is the “MPerformance” windshield banner, which I like the look of, since it feels like something an M2 owner would actually put on their car.  However, I’m disappointed that they didn’t use any of the extra budget to add black detailing to the grilles in the bumper (like they did on the premium version of this casting), as it would have made the front of the M2 look a lot more realistic. 

While the detailing is a little below what I’d expect for a Silver Series model, it’s not the biggest disappointment.  That honor is reserved for the wheels, which are modeled to look like they have stretched tires.  That effect would look cool on a stanced casting, but Hot Wheels keeps using these wheels on castings of German performance cars that aren’t made for these wheels, which always leaves the cars with massive wheel gaps.  That’s particularly frustrating on this M2 casting, because we know how great this car looks with the theoretically-cheaper mainline PR5 wheels.  I’m honestly not sure why the Silver Series is stuck with such a limited roster of wheels to choose from, and I don’t really feel a quality difference between these plastic wheels and the mainline plastic wheels, so I would rather the full lineup of plastic wheels be available for use on the Silver Series models. 

Yet, despite the inferior wheels, this M2 was still one of the “gotta have it” models from this set, because I’m just so glad to finally have another clean version of this casting.  That’s the source of my mixed feelings about the Silver Series – every negative is counteracted by a positive, and vice versa.  Consider the Dodge Challenger Demon from the Stars & Stripes series. It finally received full front and rear detailing – something that had been missing from all the mainline versions – but it also had ugly side graphics that detracted from the look of the model.  Are the negatives worth the positives? 

          As for this BMW, the negatives are relatively few, though the higher cost relative to the mainline versions is a bit of a drag, considering that it’s not meaningfully better than them.  Hopefully, if Hot Wheels is going to continue to differentiate between mainline and Silver Series wheels, they at least create some wheel designs that are a better fit for modern performance car castings like this.  Maybe in a few years, we’ll be looking back at the early models from the silver series in the same way we view the early Car Culture premium models now: cool, but nothing compared to how cool the line would ultimately become.