This part-historical, part-building tutorial article has been contributed by WoutA:
I recently started building my own LEGO classic town, Crusader City. Around the grey castle and its park in the centre, I installed a fire and police station, customs and post offices, a bookshop, houses, a gas station, a snack bar and other LEGO sets from 1978, when the minifigure was introduced, until 1993. But obviously, a LEGO town is no LEGO town without all kinds of cars cruising the streets.
Some of the sets I built already featured vehicles, such as the 379 Bus Station, 6382 Fire Station, 6362 Post Office and 6384 Police Station. But these were all utility vehicles, used to catch criminals, extinguish fires or deliver the mail or people to the right destination.
So I dived into the history of LEGO cars and wanted to share what I found with you.
Cars have been part of much of LEGO’s history, going way back to the HO sized metal vehicles in the early days of the Town Plan. For my investigation however, I concentrated on cars that are designed to seat the minifigures with flexible arms and legs as we still know them today. I also excluded construction vehicles, trucks and race cars, as I wanted to crowd the Crusader City streets with what one could call ‘family cars’. In this article I do refer to some utility vehicles as I believe these could inspire family cars or could easily be converted to them.
Simply searching for ‘LEGO car’ didn’t exactly give me what I was looking for. I first had to reduce my search results to the classic town period. Even then, names didn’t say much. For example, 6363 Auto Repair Shop from 1980 has no car but only a tow truck. The vehicles in 1966 Car Repair Shop are buggys rather than automobiles.
Instead, I looked through all the LEGO town and train sets and most of the idea books from 1978 until the early nineties approximately. Most of the cars found in these use a 4×10 or a 4×7 base. A beautiful exception is the old-timer found in 1592 Town Square – Castle Scene from 1980, which is built on a simple 2×8 plate, just like the car in 6679 Exxon Tow Truck from that same year. LEGO Idea Book 200 Building Ideas Book from 1985 has instructions for an adorable tiny car on a 2×6 plate, which I managed to shrink even further down to a 4×5 car, the tiniest one possible in minifigure scale, I believe.
In a purely subjective manner, I picked what I thought to be the most iconic example for each of the two vehicle base. The 4×10 classic town car can be found, with only slight changes, in a number of sets, including 6371 Shell Service Station, 6374 Holiday Home and 6633 Family Car. The classic town car with a 4×7 base has seen more variations, but I’ll take one of its earliest appearances, in 1484 Houses, as a reference. Now let’s see how these are built and how all of their components evolved over the years.
Step 1: vehicle base
With the flexible minifigure, a 4x10x2/3 vehicle base (part number 4212) was also introduced in 1978. It has a recessed centre, to sit the minifigure down straight or to install a chair, and cutouts which allow you to attach wheels. The first three years, a version with a centre hole was used in ten sets in three colours. White ones only appeared in police vehicles while there were also black and red ones.
The 6627 Convertible from 1980, a great little car, saw the first appearance of the red 4×10 vehicle base, this time without the centre hole. Versions in black, white and yellow were released in 1982. Interestingly, the white one was first used not for a car but for the 6890 Cosmic Cruiser, a classic LEGO spaceship.
The 4×10 chassis only appeared in blue in two sets: 6346 Shuttle Launching Crew from 1992 an
