Small but still furious

The Fast and Furious franchise is minting money off family, death, brotherhood, muscle growth products and model cars. Everybody loves crashing, exploding cars and the safest and easiest way to do that is to do it with model cars.

For fans, what's out there in scale models that you should get or avoid? Starting with 1:64, look no farther than Hot Wheels. They have almost the entire slew of cars including the famed Charger in both blown and skydiving form. They did it well with good proportions and relatively good attention to detail. Can't get better at 150taka.

Jada specializes in licensing these cars in 1:55, 1:24 and some 1:18 scales. However, Jada takes extreme liberty with their designs. Take for instance the halo car: the 70 Charger. Every Jada version is horribly disproportionate. The front wheels are situated far, far back like a front wheel drive car. And it's too short. And what is up with the red C2 Corvette from the latest movie? The Jada version looks like it has been stretched by about a foot or two. Avoid both.What they did get right was the 70 restomod Barracuda driven by Letty in Furious 7. Perfect proportions, good wheels and nice decals.

Greenlight does ace recreations of many of their cars especially in 1:43 scale. The cream of the crop is the Escort RS1600 driven by the late Paul Walker in the sixth movie. They have excellent recreations in 1:18 scale offering both closed shell metal versions as well as full opening diecasts such as the fantastic orange Challenger from the second movie. One thing they haven't released is that delectable Jensen Interceptor.