Bumblebee was drawn as a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, and Volkswagen owns the shape of that car. Mattel put the Hot Wheels Transformers Bumblebee up on Mattel Creations this morning, and the licence is printed twice. It sits in the copyright block on the listing, and again on the back of the box under the checkered stripe. That panel reads Volkswagen Official Licensed Product, beside a line saying the trademarks, design patents and copyrights are used with the approval of the owner Volkswagen AG. [1]

It goes on sale on September 17 at 9:00 am PT, at $65.00, with a limit of three per customer, listed as a Creations Exclusive Design under the code JJY49. Mattel calls it the third 1:64 Transformers collaboration, based on the G1 version of the character. The spec block is a Red Line Club card down to the Real Riders line, and then it ends somewhere no die-cast card goes. A 1967 Volkswagen Type 1 Beetle body in matte yellow with subtle weathering, custom Real Riders wheels, tinted blue glass, a moulded black interior, and thirteen points of articulation once it is standing up. The box back carries one more line the web listing leaves out, Metal/Metal, the Hot Wheels shorthand for a die-cast body sitting on a die-cast base.

Neither of the two that came before it carries a carmaker’s line at all. The Optimus Prime that opened this run in 2024 was a heavy-duty truck cab with attachable hands and an ion blaster, and last September’s Nemesis Prime was his gloss black clone with teal accents and translucent red glass. Read either listing and the only rights holder credited is Hasbro. [2] A truck cab needs nobody’s permission, but a 1967 Beetle needs Volkswagen’s.

The Beetle detailing is all on the casting. The rear deck lid has the ribbed louvres running along the base of the back window, the chrome flank trim is a separate silver strip rather than a painted suggestion, and the overriders on the bumper are picked out in silver over the orange lens housings. The Hot Wheels flame is tampo printed low on the engine lid, small, where a dealer badge would sit on a real one, but the Autobot face gets no such modesty and sits up on the roof in G1 red. Best of all is the weathering! It is rubbed through along the crown of the rear wing and across the top of the deck lid.

The Hot Wheels Transformers Bumblebee in robot mode standing behind the same figure shown as a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, on a red backdrop.

In robot mode the roof and glasshouse become the chest, the doors hang off the shoulders as the outer arms, and the front clip splits and ends up on the feet. The head that comes up out of the middle is the G1 head, silver face, blue eyes and two horns, and the proportions are the blocky ones from the 1984 box art on the tray behind it. [3]

Mattel is selling the presentation about as hard as the casting, and we are giving the box its own paragraph because it earns one. The figure ships in a premium window box that displays it in either mode, backed with G1 style artwork of Bumblebee on a grid and the old Transformers wordmark with the Autobot face in the crossbar. That box then sits inside a black and red mailer with two compartments. On the left the die-cast sits in a clear blister over a retro Hot Wheels card that still reads “hottest metal cars in the world!” next to an Autobot badge. On the right there is a printed conversion sheet with step diagrams, headed in several languages, the way a G1 toy came.

The open Hot Wheels Transformers Bumblebee mailer box, with the die-cast car sealed in a blister on a retro Hot Wheels card on the left and a printed conversion instruction sheet on the right.

Across the multilingual panel on the box back, in caps, is the line to read before anyone hands this to a child. NOT FOR USE WITH HOT WHEELS SETS.

If you want the crossover on a shelf this week instead of next, the Hasbro half of it is already out there. BigBadToyStore has four Transformers Collaborative Hot Wheels x Transformers Deluxe Class figures in stock at $34.99, all four with a live add to cart. One of them is the Twin Mill, which runs the joke the other way by turning a Hot Wheels casting into a Transformer! The Creations pair that preceded Bumblebee are both gone from Mattel’s own store, and nothing about this one suggests it holds out longer. It opens on September 17 at 9:00 am PT.

We have had a good fortnight for Bumblebee merchandise between Funko’s Retro Toys wave and the Target popcorn bucket and Big Figs, and this is the one with a carmaker’s name on the back of the box.

Sources

[1]: The Hasbro and Transformers trademarks are credited separately on the same panel, and the Volkswagen line sits apart from them under its own Official Licensed Product mark. [2]: Optimus Prime listed at $80.00 and Nemesis Prime at $65.00. Nemesis went up on September 16, 2025. [3]: Mattel prints the articulation count and nothing about the conversion sequence, so the fold described here is read off the official photography of both modes rather than from a step list. The box art referred to is the illustration printed on the window box tray, visible in Mattel’s own packaging shots.