Hey, Auto World/Round 2 peeps, pay attention to this; you have an unhappy customer here, and considering I’ve bought probably about 15 grand worth of merch from you over the last 3 years or so, you might want to pretend to care…
I’ve been hoping for a long time that I wouldn’t have to write this post; I was hoping that maybe some lingering “supply chain problems” caused by the “scamdemic” might work themselves out, so I was patient. Alas, its getting worse instead of better, and after tonight’s unboxing of a brand new slot car, my patience is at an end.
The most recent issues from Auto World have been noticeably sub-standard. If you’ve bought a brand new AW slot car in the last year, and especially in the last 6 months, you must be seeing what I’m seeing: parts that were once chrome plated now painted silver; generally rougher finishes on all surfaces, both metal and plastic; and worst of all, noticeably slower chassis. Sometimes you get bad ones, sometimes you get bad batches. This is beyond that: this is an obvious reduction in quality. And to this slot-head, it has become unacceptable.
Tonight I unboxed this maroon Buick Riviera with great anticipation and, as always, immediately went about putting my custom wheels and tires on it, because, what are RWL tires doing on a Riviera?? From the moment I dropped it out of the clam shell and into my hand I noticed the difference. Compare it to the bright blue one I bought in 2020; the front and rear bumpers, rather than being plated with chrome, are now painted silver. The car’s paint is a pleasing color but the finish is dull and listless compared to one that’s many years older. The worst decline, however, is underneath; look at the pickup shoes, which are both crooked along their entire length and rough-hewn at the edges, and note how the rivets have made visible indentations in the pick-up mounts, as if the metal used has been made so thin now that the rivets can’t even be installed without bending it. This is just as bad as the ’57 Chevy I bought about 6 months ago, which was so awful that I wouldn’t even put it on my track; I just used the chassis for another car and threw the body into my junk box.
The last dozen or so Ultra-G’s that I’ve bought have been significantly slower than the ones I was buying two years or even a year ago. The only exceptions were the premium white ones I recently won, but I suspect those were older stock since they were out of production models. And it’s not my imagination, because I recently bought a small handful of chassis that I know were 3 years old, and all of them were screamers.
I realize prices are through the roof and something’s got to give; I realize that the idiot leadership of the Western world is making doing business almost impossible. But hey, AW, who is your market? Is it kids, or is it adult collectors?
If AW is going to continue down this road, they may want to consider doing what Hot Wheels did years ago: faced with the prospect of losing adult collectors while cheapening kid’s toys, they simply came up with new product lines: the “Premiums”, the “Car Culture” line, and various other special editions which were priced far higher than the 99 cent WalMart bin cars; while the mainline cars became almost entirely plastic, their various premium series brought back metal bases, rubber tires, and were often sold in classy, reusable packaging. Yes, they were expensive; they were made for people who wanted more and were willing to pay for it. Yours truly was and is a regular buyer!
As for myself, I’m not going to spend my hard earned money on junk. The prices on the older cars on the collector market just keep going up, and with this decline in quality that trend will keep accelerating. So be it; I’ll have to be content to buy fewer of them-and pay significantly more-to get the good ones… the ones made years ago, before our society lost its collective mind.
Unless I see an improvement, this pair of AW’s are the last of the new, “mainline” AW T-Jet’s I’ll be buying. I guess that, like everything else, even slot cars are going to shit…all part of “the new normal.”
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