TTAC's 2018 Holiday Gift Guide: The Best Gifts for Car People

Let’s start off our holiday gift guide cheap and simple with Hot Wheels. Car enthusiasts of all ages love getting Hot Wheels and they make a perfect stocking stuffer at Christmas. Kids love to play with them and if you’re older, they are great for displaying on your desk at work or in your home office, for example.

Hot Wheels are also fairly inexpensive, so you can pick up a large amount of them for relatively cheap. Other products have gotten more expensive in the last 20 years, but Hot Wheels have stayed true to form. We might just go and add ’20 Hot Wheels’ to our Christmas list right now.

Moving up from Hot Wheels in price range and size are scale model cars. Maisto makes decent quality model cars that are affordable first and foremost. This makes them a solid, affordable add-on gifts. They are also great for kids who may play with the models as toys rather than display them like most adults will.

The company also makes more expensive scale models that aren’t designed to be played with by younger children. A wide variety of cars are also available from Maisto, from a Ford F-150 to a Ferrari FXX-K and everything in between. We’d suggest having a good look at what the company has to offer before making a purchase – they make everything!

The LEGO Creator line of products are for older, experienced LEGO enthusiasts and adults.

Included in the high-end line of LEGO Creator kits are numerous cars including a very stylish and well-executed Mini Cooper, a VW Beetle, a VW van and even a double-decker bus. If you know someone who loves to plug away at time-intensive projects (or just likes LEGO and is into car) this would make a perfect gift. It would also give them a great way to relax and enjoy any time off they get during the holidays.

The LEGO Creator line of products can be over 1,000 pieces in size and will end up being quite large when fully built. The Mini Cooper pictured above, for example, will measure in 9 inches long, 5 inches wide and 4 inches high. They are designed for LEGO fans 16 years of age or older.

Cars & Coffee is a popular name for Sunday morning car meets and there’s a good reason for it – cars and coffee go great together!

That makes an automotive-themed coffee mug a great gift for any car enthusiast in your life. One of our favorites is Porsche’s gold-trimmed coffee mug (above), which is elegant, simple and large enough to hold plenty of coffee for those late nights spent working in the garage.

The Porsche mug is just an idea, though. If the car enthusiast in your life likes Chevys or BMWs, for example, it won’t be hard to find them a mug with those logos online.

An automotive branded travel bag is another great christmas gift for car/and or enthusiasts.

It can be nice to have a travel bag that matches the brand of your car, so if the car-obsessed person in your life likes to take road trips, this is a great idea.

Our example image is this nice Mercedes-AMG Petronas travel bag, which is great for any Mercedes-AMG or Formula 1 fan who may want to do some travelling. Other brands make travel bags as well, though, including BMW, Corvette and Ferrari, among many more.

An automotive branded wallet is another great Christmas gift idea for gearheads.

If you truly love an automaker, it can be nice to get a glimpse of their logo every time you pull your wallet out. It’s also a good conversation starter and a way to show off your enthusiasm for cars everywhere you go.

There are a ton of automotive themed wallets out there, so it shouldn’t be hard to find one well suited to the person you are shopping for.

Why not get some driving shoes to go with that wallet or bag, too?

PUMA has a nice wearable shoe designed for driving called the DriftCat, which is available in Ferrari and BMW branding, along with traditional Puma branding.

The GoodYear Ori line of shoes is also designed with driving in mind, but are also good for walking everyday. Motorsports company Sparco makes an everyday driving shoe as well called the Esse.

If the person you’re shopping for has a vintage car, consider getting them some driving gloves like the pair we’ve linked to here.

Gloves likes these provide better grip on the sometimes slippery wood wheels of older cars. They also improve your grip when changing gears with a manual transmission.

As an added bonus, they can keep your hands warm driving in the winter months. Everyone hates driving with a freezing cold steering wheel and gear selector and winter gloves are too thick and slippery to drive with. These are a decent middle ground and you can use them in the summer months as well.

There are also many other styles and brands of driving gloves, so be sure to look around before making a purchase.

There are tons of automotive themed books out there. If you know someone who is into cars and reading, a book makes a great gift at Christmas. We’ve always loved kicking back during our winter holiday break and enjoying some light reading.

Some of the best-rated automotive themed books include Clarkson on Cars by Top Gear and The Grand Tour presenter Jeremy Clarkson, Go Like Hell by A.J. Baime and Porsche 70 Years by Randy Leffingwell.

Automotive coffee table books are also a good idea as well and sometimes feature nice photographs printed on film paper for the reader to appreciate.

Automotive magazines are a great way for enthusiasts to indulge in their high octane passion during mundane times – like when they are in the bathroom, on airplane or in a waiting room, for example.

We’d say that pretty much every car enthusiast on the planet would appreciate a subscription to a car magazine (we had about 10 at once when were kids) and luckily for you, magazines are now more affordable than ever.

You can get a year subscription to Motor Trend for someone this Christmas for less than $10, while a subscription to Car and Driver will cost a little more than $15. That’s a great deal for a gift that keeps on giving for a whole year straight. We hope someone gets one for us, to be honest.

Cool team apparel has been around since the advent of racing and race-themed jackets remain a fashionable way to keep warm today.

One of our favorites is this Gulf Racing jacket from Charles River Apparel. This jacket is designed to look like the coats race teams would wear in the 1960s and 1970s, when Gulf Oil was ubiquitous in racing paddocks. The company’s logo is still a common site at race tracks even today.

This jacket is 100% with a cotton twill shell and a 100% cotton poplin lining. It features Gulf, Firestone and Heuer Chronograph logos, along with an American flag patch on the sleeve. It’s perfect for any racing fan or Porsche fan!

The best thing about slot cars is they are enjoyed by car enthusiasts both young and old.

Whether the person you are shopping for is 10 years old or well into their 50s, they will love playing with this Scalextric slot car set. It comes with a full track and two vintage-style Mustang and Camaro cars to race. The track also has 3 different layout options.

A good part about the Scalextric brand is the company makes many different tracks and cars with interchangeable parts. If you break something or want to expand your set, this makes it easy to do so.

Buying this set can also be the start to the person you’re shopping for starting a larger slot car hobby.

This awesome-looking AWD RC rally car from Traxxas may look familiar to any car enthusiasts who watch Ken Block’s Gymkhana series. It’s modeled after the Fiesta ST rally car that Block has been known to pilot and can pull off similarly impressive drifts.

This ready-to-drive RC car comes with a waterproof electric motor, fulltime all-wheel drive, replica rally wheels with grippy tires and a hobby-grade radio system. The battery and charger is sold separately, it should be noted.

With the optional different gearing and an improved battery (both available from Traxxas) this can be an extremely fast RC car, but out of the box it will do about 30 mph. We’d suggest any of Traxxas many different RC products to those shopping for younger or teenage car enthusiasts this holiday season. Adults can appreciate these well-made RC toys, too.

There are some nice minimalist, car-themed prints and posters for sale on Amazon that may appeal to some car enthusiasts.

The nice thing about these car prints is that they are available in a wide variety of brand themes, so whether the person you are shopping for is into BMW M3s or Mazda Miatas, you shouldn’t have a problem finding a print they will like.

These stylish prints aren’t too expensive, either, so you could even pick up more than one for the person you’re shopping for. They would look great in a garage, bedroom or office. They are also available in a range of sizes, too.

And finally, rounding out our automotive themed holiday gift guide is the LEGO Technic line of products. There are a few LEGO Technic car kits that are currently offered, including an awesome Bugatti Chiron, a Porsche 911 GT3 RS and a Mack Anthem transport truck.

These kits are large, high quality and rather complex. The Chiron, for example, has a working active rear wing, eight-speed gearbox, suspension and other high-tech components. It measures in at 5 inches high, 22 inches long and 9 inches wide.

While expensive, these kits are considered collector’s items and are a quite a thing to behold when fully built. They are a cool thing to display in an office or bedroom, or even a garage.