Trivia / Mini 4WD

• Brand Name Takeover: In Malaysia, these are known as Tamiyas.
• Defictionalization:
  • The Street Mini 4WD discipline, which was first invented in Sicily, was inspired by the Dash! Yonkuro manga where racers follow their cars as they scoot along a long and winding race track. Though since the cars are in real life directly driven by a motor without any remote control^note There did exist a short-lived line of radio controlled Mini 4WD cars, but control for these cars was limited to just their speed similar to a slot car., hockey stick-like bats were devised to guide them along the way.
  • As of 2019, two life-sized 1/1 working Mini 4WD cars were made; A life-sized two-seater Gun Bluster XTO was made in 1998 as a tie-in to the anime film. In 2015, a life-sized single-seat Aero Avante was made as part of the Giant Mini 4WD Project that year.
• Fandom Life Cycle: In Malaysia, it started at Stage 0b in the mid-90s thanks to aggressive marketing by the local distributor. Upon release it surged straight to Stage 5 with every school-going kid and teen knowing what Mini 4WD cars are, helped by the airings of Dash! Yonkuro. Towards the Turn of the Millennium, it had a cool down at Stage 6a, but then hit a Stage X and surged back to Stage 5 thanks to airings of Bakusou Kyoudai! Let’s & Go!! Hitting the screens, again sponsored by said distributor. The fandom slid back to Stage 6a once The New '10s rolled around and stayed there since- you can’t find the models outside of hobby shops now compared to back in the mid-90s, when every single stores that carry toys used to carry them, but it’s safe to say that their popularity have not faded as tracks can still be found at many malls around the country.
• No Export for You: Two models of the Mini 4WD cars are currently extremely hard to get outside of Japan:
  • The Lord Spirit, which was featured in the manga Mini4King as Mota Kudo's car, was never imported officially by Tamiya's official oversea agents (including Tamiya USA in the US), and was only imported by third-party importers. Subverted with other Laser Mini 4WD cars such as Jadow A and Lord Knight, which were made available worldwide.
  • The God Burning Sun had very limited distribution outside of Japan for some reason^note Rumors claim that overzealous religious parties vetoed the import of the kit in some countries due to the use of the word God in its name. This obviously makes it a challenge for collectors of the Burning Sun series of Mini 4WD cars to complete their collection.
• Not the Intended Use: Given how they use the standard 140 form factor, some of the DC motors used on Mini 4WD cars have found their way in various other niches, like Nerf guns and Thomas & Friends train sets to name a few, owing to the fact that they perform a dozen times better than the electric toothbrush-grade motors that came with them.
• Quietly Cancelled: Over the decades, there are two Mini 4WD lineups that were discontinued and removed from Tamiya's product catalogs (which also includes their online sites) entirely.
  • The first lineup to bite the dust is the R/C Mini 4WD series as it failed to compete against Bandai's similar BakuSeed toy cars at 2002 to 2003. To this day, Tamiya refuse to acknowledge the lineup's existence.
  • The latest victim of this is the Laser Mini 4WD series, which was discontinued and removed from the online catalog at around October 2023, a few months after the conclusion of the manga Mini4King. The removal from the catalog is likely due to the lacks of sales of the lineup and the manga's lack of popularity. Other speculations includes the expiration of the licensing between Tamiya and Shogakukan (who published the manga) regarding Mini4King.
• Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy: The anime and manga series would often show the cars as having features such as moving spoilers and even weapons, but this would obviously be left out of the real-life cars themselves. Some cars such as the ones used by Tokichi Mikuni would sometimes be shown without a front bumper as well. This was rectified somewhat with the Mechanical line, which was a series of static models more closely based on the cars' animated renditions, and with the VZ Chassis, which has a modular front and rear bumper design allowing for a bumper-less setup which could be of at least some benefit to those who build show-quality cars intended to be more for visual competition similar to a full-scale car show than for racing.