Fresh from Jay Leno’s Garage: the Hot Wheels EcoJet
Take a look at the Premium Hot Wheels model of the car Jay designed himself.
Jay Leno has just about every car imaginable in his collection. What does he do when he imagines a new car, though? Obviously, he teams up with General Motors and builds it! This is the EcoJet, part of a recent Hot Wheels Premium set featuring an assortment of cars from Jay’s garage. Shockingly, the EcoJet was the only car I could find locally from the set, so I snatched it up while I had the chance.
The EcoJet debuted at SEMA in 2006 after about two years of development. Jay and GM utilized a Corvette Z06 chassis and transmission, wrapped in a carbon-fibre and Kevlar package. Did Jay use an old school big block V8 to power his dream car? Did they slap four-turbos onto a LS-derived V12 engine? No, it’s running a damn Honeywell LTS101 turbine engine! Obviously, this explains the “Jet” part of the name. The “Eco” gets credited to the fact that this car can run on biodiesel fuel. This was the early 2000’s don’t forget; EV’s really hadn’t hit their stride yet.
It’s very difficult to see, but Hot Wheels did include the massive turbine engine underneath the smoked rear glass. I have absolutely zero complaints about this car! The wheels look so close to the chrome turbine-style wheels on Jay’s car. The googly-eye headlamps are perfectly tampo’d on and the silverish-blue paint looks striking. If you want to see this car in action, look for the video of Jay and Neil DeGrasse Tyson taking the EcoJet down a runway. The driver’s side window blew out!
So far, there have been two Premium sets with Jay’s name on them. There are some amazing choices in these sets too, like a Countach 5000 QV, McLaren F1, and Jay’s Tank Car. Hopefully this relationship continues to spawn new sets for us collectors. Life hasn’t been too kind to Leno over the past year or so. First, he was injured in a car fire while working in his garage. Recently, NBC declined to pick up another season of his TV show ‘Jay Leno’s Garage’. He just wrecked his 1940 Indian motorcycle last month too! While taking the bike out for a test run, Jay was clotheslined by some unseen wire, sending him flying off the vintage motorcycle. He busted his knees, broke some ribs, and received a broken collar bone. Let’s hope that rolling these Hot Wheels cars across his casts helps get him well soon!
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