Up till now, both Trailbreaker and Hoist toys are often recolors with minor retools of each other. For Masterpiece figures, since Takara always goes for the cartoon look, the toys cannot be simply recolors of each other. Retooling won't help much because Trailbreaker is lanky and Hoist is fat looking. That would mean Takara can't reuse the mold and it may be less likely that these toys will ever get released.
They essentially could just make the Hoist figure collapse at the waist (so he doesn't have one), which would get you closer to the animation model.
It'll probably never happen. As I say this, look forward to a 3P reveal. That's my luck with saying things.
Just realized there are those panels on Hoist arms too. This reminds me of MP Red Alert missing door panels on his arms.
My guess is they'll end up favoring Trailbreaker, with Hoist being a bit less accurate. Similar to Sideswipe and Red Alert. Original character gets first treatment, remold gets as close as possible to its character model with slight remolding. Or TT completely surprises us and does use two separate molds. That's less likely, but could be possible if the line is selling strongly enough and generating sufficient profit.
They both have to be able to transform from the same vehicle. They may engineer it so it can do both.
They'll pull it off. Look at how heavily they retooled MP-11 for Ramjet. Looking at these models, TB and Hoist pretty much have the same torso. Hoist will need some remolded legs, but I bet some of the other things won't be too difficult to accomplish - I can picture "mistransforming" him a bit to get the hips to collapse in, have the shoulder panels out, and have his ankle wheels flipped out.
They could release them both as new molds and repaint them twice into their Diaclone colors (red version & blue version for Hoist and yellow version & blue version for Trailbreaker). They could also make a red body version of Trailbreaker from that one scene in G1. Diaclone Car Robots – Part 1 | Source Blog
If they made MP Hoist and Trailbreaker, I really hope they wouldn't be lazy like they did with Sideswipe and Red Alert, where they remolded a few parts but didn't change enough to match how Red Alert differed from Sideswipe. They should have made new molds or at least changed the transformation, and they should do one of those here.
this. plus however they handle the camper/wrecker bed assemblies could factor in the differences. it'd be cool to see this engineered. -
They've both got nice vehicle modes. Trailbreaker's bot mode is a bit bland but I love Hoist's bot mode. Despite lacking in articulation, the head sculpt and vibrant colour scheme really ooze character.
