The Coolest Way To Display Your Hot Wheels Cars Is In This Shockingly Accurate Mini Gas Station

If you’re reading this right now, chances are you’re like me and you have an affliction for collecting tiny cars. Look, I get it, I can’t afford a real Lotus Emira, but I can definitely buy a Hot Wheels version. Most of the time, displaying your rides means putting them in a boring clear case. Forget that, I have something better. Start putting your cars in these sweet scale model convenience stores!

Selling off my most problematic cars has allowed me to give some more attention to previously neglected hobbies. Since offloading my worst cars, I’ve revived a motorcycle that’s been sitting for 11 years, built a few computers, fixed my BMW E61, revived a mothballed Smart, and even got most of the way to getting my 1948 Plymouth Special Deluxe going. That just goes to show how much time having too many cars takes out of your life.

I also got back into collecting Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars. I’ve been out of this game for so long I wasn’t even aware of the scalping phenomenon until Hot Wheels teased the “Not Wheels” limited release last year. That hasn’t stopped me from buying the cars I want and I’ve perhaps expanded my collection by a few dozen cars over the past month. Eventually, I hit a sort of wall. I have hundreds of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, but display only a couple at a time. I wanted a cool way to show these bad boys off!

Just displaying your diecast collection is pretty easy. Go to your local store, buy a display case, and put the cars in the display case. Boom, you’re done. Or, you could buy a 1/64 diecast-specific case, which also does the job. But here’s the thing: these options look terribly boring.

That’s when I discovered that there’s a whole world of 1:64 diecast car dioramas out there. Want to display your cars in something that looks like a rich guy’s garage? Boom, you can get one of those for $25 on Amazon:

Do you want to operate the world’s smallest buy-here-pay-here lot, complete with LED lighting? You can 3D print that!

Tiny car dioramas are all over the Internet and the vast majority of them are super affordable. Seriously, a search for “car diorama 1/64” online yields some incredible results. Here’s a completely random three-story 1/64 car garage that I found on eBay:

All of these were cool, but I wanted something more. I wanted to replicate real life. Back in 2023, I was lucky enough to test the Ford F-150 FP700 right on a weekend when Detroit’s Woodward Ave was alive with all sorts of car enthusiasm. I saw everything from souped-up rotted-out trucks to Lamborghinis and all points in between.

At some point in my drive up and down the iconic strip, I pulled into a Shell station a little bit away from my favorite Detroit area burger joint. In fact, it was the exact gas station above.

What was memorable about it was that it was teeming with car enthusiasm. There was a group of maybe five Ferdinand Piech-era Volkswagens lined up for one pump. On the other side was a highly-modified current-gen Toyota Supra banging off of its rev-limiter. In the nearby parking lot sat a variety of pickup truck bros and I even saw a random guy just chilling in his Lucid Air. Of course, it was still a regular gas station, of course, so among the chaos of enthusiasm there were still old ladies in Subarus just trying to get some gas and such.

I thought, “How do I replicate that, but in Hot Wheels form?” As it turns out, that part is super easy, barely an inconvenience. A number of creators and companies make branded versions of tiny car dioramas. You can get dioramas that replicate garages and dealerships of popular car brands. You can also get dioramas focused on car culture.

Back in the 2010s, car enthusiasts began having little meetups at places like 7-Eleven, posting sweet pictures of their rides just in front of the warm glow of the famous company logo. It became such a huge thing that 7-Eleven continues to openly embrace it. The convenience store company’s Instagram account is full of cool cars and cool people fueling up.

 

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At first, I was blown away that you can buy a scale model of a 7-Eleven to replicate these scenes with your diecast cars. An enthusiast-run model company called Aventi Designs makes a pretty sweet catalog of garages, nature spaces, and street scenes. These folks even make a Starbucks that you can park your diecasts in front of.

I also found something called G-Fans. Despite some sleuthing, I couldn’t really find anything about this company. I know it’s a company that makes miniature models and ships from China, but that’s about it. At any rate, G-Fans does have a pretty awesome model of a Shell station with incredible detail.

The company also has what I think is one of the coolest models of a 7-Eleven store. So screw it, I parted ways with $100 and bought both. The Shell station was $60 at the time and the 7-Eleven was $40. I got the Shell station from LiveCarModel.com and the 7-Eleven model from an eBay seller.

The Shell station arrived a few days ago and I was excited to put it together. I was immediately impressed with this thing. It came neatly packed and protected with pretty clear instructions on how to put it all together.

Everything just snaps into place, but if the snap-fit isn’t secure, G-Fans says to simply glue it. In my case, most bits fit together snugly. The only parts that needed glue were the station’s garbage cans and one of the pumps.

Check out the level of detail here. The prints on the plastic aren’t super-high resolution, but you can make out Hot Wheels cars and jugs of coolant on the shelves. You can clearly read the ads for Red Bull and other stuff like that.

The intricate details are also really cool. Check out the work put into making the gas pump realistic:

The real magic comes in the lighting system. The diorama uses just one LED strip to light the whole thing up. The lighting effects are pretty neat, too. The gas station store doesn’t have a real roof, so it gets direct lighting from the LEDs. The gas station canopy is made out of plastic thin enough for the LED’s light to perfectly bleed through them.

Turn off the lights and the effect is just fantastic:

Next came placing the cars, and this was also really easy. A reader recommended a sort of adhesive called Quakehold Museum Wax to secure diecast cars. The stuff is marketed as being just tacky enough to hold things in place and keep them there in case of interactions with pets or earthquakes, and many museums do use it for their displays. The wax holds firmly yet releases easily with a twist. In other words, it’s great stuff for a static display! I gave each car a small ball of wax and yep, they’re staying put just fine. And true to the product’s word, when I peeled a car off of the diorama this morning I found no damage to the diorama or the car. Brilliant.

Once you set your diorama up, you can buy little figurines to pose against the cars and put into the store to help the diorama come to life. I haven’t done that yet, but I did put it into a display case to keep it safe from my dastardly birds. Next, I just have to wait for the 7-Eleven one to come in so I can do this all over again.

If I have any advice, is that you should avoid buying the cheapest possible display case on Amazon. The one I put the gas station into is only barely passable as a case and I had to super glue its connection points together. Otherwise, even a light breeze makes it come apart.

Anyway, was the a waste of 100 bucks? Eh, maybe. But hey, the way I see it, spending smaller amounts of money on collectibles is probably better than spending tons of money on broken cars that’ll never work well, right? Either way, I dig it, and it definitely upped my diecast car display. So, it’s all good in my book.