カブトボーグ　|　Kabutoborg

Originally posted: 5th January 2026

This toy franchise was originally created in 2004 by Takara Tomy. Kabutoborg toys are essentially cars with pullback motors which are fitted with insect-inspired armour pieces, and the horns and mandibles of several different kinds of beetle.

Kabutoborg feature a wheel on the back which can be spun by running the toy against a surface to charge up the motor, then when you're ready, you can set the Kabutoborg back on the surface and it will drive forward and make simple motions (such as turning its head up and down to hopefully flip over any opponents.)

There are lots of different types of Kabutoborg, as well as accessories such as a battle stage. When you open a box of Kabutoborg, you will find that the toy has to be assembled, which is brilliant because a lot of the parts are mix-and-match, which means if you have multiple sets you could switch armour types, heads, and wheels around with other Kabutoborg to make your own custom toy. I assume this would encourage a little bit of strategy when preparing for a fight, it sort of reminds me of Robot Wars in a way.

When researching for this article, I actually found a really cool video on Youtube of a 3D printed, custom made Kabutoborg based on Heracross from Pokémon! You can see it below, I think it demonstrates the customisation feature of Kabutoborg quite well:

Although the Kabutoborg series was originally released in 2004 (and eventually got its own anime adaptation in 2006!) it has since had a re-release in 2023. The images shown in this article are all the newer toys which are still advertised by Takara Tomy, and you can find the website here.

I'm sorry that there's not much more information about Kabutoborg, I was struggling to find more information about the sets, and I don't understand very much Japanese, but you can do some searches yourself by looking up the phrase "カブトボーグ" online, there are lots of cool photos of collections people have.

Thanks for reading about Kabutoborg, next time I will probably make an article about the Dangomushi series of Gashapon models from Bandai, as I actually have some of them myself! Until next time!