THE PROJECT

Jared Kang is a creative director based in Singapore. In 2019, he bought his older son a Tomica as a first toy: #95-3, the London Bus.

That should have been it. One small die-cast car, bought for a child.

Instead, he kept coming back to it. When was this model made? Where was it made? Why did the casting change? What shifted from one run to the next? He was no longer just buying Tomicas. He was following the line behind them: production history, transport history, bits of industrial history, one model at a time.

The deeper he went, the more the search itself started to stall.

Useful information sat in too many places. A detail in a Japanese auction listing. A date in an old catalogue. A clue in a collector thread from 2004. Then a dead link. You could follow one trail for hours and still not know if you had the right answer. There was no single map of the full lineage.

So he built one.

From the first serious research pass to a live site, the project took four months. Jared worked through the structure, tested platforms and stacks, binned the ones that stalled, and kept rebuilding until he had a chassis that could carry the material properly. He built the whole thing himself: the architecture, the design, the system, the build.

AI was part of the process too. Jared spent a lot of time road-testing tools and workflows before deciding what was actually worth keeping. He used it for research, data work, code, and image generation. Every model car image on this site is AI-generated.

It started with one London Bus. This site is where that route led.

Tomicars Club is an independent archival project dedicated to the systematic documentation of Tomica die-cast miniature vehicles produced by Tomy and Takara Tomy since 1970. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Takara Tomy.

Every release is catalogued with the rigour of a museum archive — not just what the model is, but when it was produced, where it was manufactured, what evidence supports that, and how confident we are in each data point.

Despite Tomica being one of the longest-running and most collected die-cast series in the world, there is no comprehensive English-language reference for serious collectors. Information is scattered across Japanese auction listings, out-of-print catalogues, and fragmented forum posts.

Tomicars Club exists to change that — to build a single, verified, well-structured archive that collectors worldwide can rely on.

The long-term goal is to document every release across all major Tomica series — Red Box, Black Box, Foreign, Limited, Premium, Limited Vintage, and Limited Vintage Neo — with verified data, photographic evidence, and cited sources for every record.

The archive is intentionally incomplete. Records are only published when sufficient evidence exists to support them. Accuracy is prioritised over volume.

Each entry in this archive represents a distinct release — a specific vehicle assigned to a Tomica issue number. A release is not simply a model; it is a model as it was commercially issued, including its packaging era, sales period, and production country.

Issue numbers (e.g. #1) identify a slot in the lineup. Where multiple distinct vehicles have occupied the same slot across different eras, each is recorded as a separate release and assigned a branch identifier (e.g. 1-1, 1-2, 1-3). This allows the full history of any given slot to be traced over time.

Colour and livery variants of the same vehicle within the same era are noted in production notes but are not catalogued as separate releases unless they represent a meaningful commercial distinction.

Not all data in this archive is equally certain. Where ambiguity exists — particularly around manufactured country and exact sales periods — each data point is assigned a confidence level.

Primary sources are weighted most heavily: original Tomica product boxes (base stamps, copyright text), official Tomy and Takara Tomy catalogues, and direct physical inspection of units.

Secondary sources include established collector communities, Japanese auction listings (Yahoo Auctions Japan, Mercari), and dedicated Tomica reference publications. Where secondary sources are used, they are cited individually against the relevant release record.

All evidence sources cited on individual release pages can be found in the Evidence & Sources section of that record.

This archive is an ongoing project. The following are known gaps not yet fully documented:

• Foreign market exclusives and regional variants
• Gift set and multi-pack releases
• Promotional and non-retail releases
• Pre-production and prototype units
• Complete colour and livery variant listings within a single release