While the LEGO Modular Building series is set in modern times, the buildings themselves are mostly old style structures. Reusing and even repurposing old buildings is very much part of modern city life. While the sets are mostly focused on the buildings themselves, a couple of them do include vehicles. The #10197 LEGO Creator Fire Brigade comes with an old style fire engine, and the #10232 LEGO Creator Palace Cinema includes a classic limousine. 🙂
This also depicts modern city life quite accurately, where old vehicles are still running amongst newer models. Some of them are well maintained service-vehicles, other are the pride of collectors who take their classic cars out for a spin on the weekends. So you can certainly add modern vehicles to your LEGO Modular city, and mix in some old styles as well. Or if you choose to, you can even take back the entire LEGO Modular Building series to the 1930s, and use classic style vehicles only with ladies and gens milling about.
I have my LEGO Modular Building street set in modern times, but I do really like the old style fire engine in the #10197 LEGO Creator Fire Brigade set. and wanted to add some more classic vehicles around town. LEGO minifigure size classic vehicles look quite charming, just like their real life counterparts. Of course you can design classic LEGO cars from scratch, but if you need a little help or inspiration, LEGO actually released quite a few classic-style vehicles in official LEGO sets.
Many of these sets with classic vehicles I will talk about here have been retired already, but you can easily get the building instructions online directly from LEGO’s website or from websites like BrickInstructions.com. You can either copy the vehicles as they are from the instructions, or use them as springboards for your own creations. You can even change up colors or other details to create more variety. Here I will show you some classic-style LEGO cars from official LEGO sets that I found during my research. They may give you some ideas and inspiration for your own LEGO city.
The green vehicle (pictures first in this article) is from the extremely rare 2015 San Diego Comic-Con exclusive LEGO Action Comics #1 Superman set. This is one of the vehicles I choose to add to my city, as it looks fantastic. While the set is only 145 pieces, it sells for hundreds of dollars on eBay, so unless you are a collector of rare sets, it is not worth to get it. However Allen from the BrickFan was kind enough to upload the instructions (see here), which is what I used to build the car. Please note that building the vehicle in all green is not possible without some modification, as the roof piece only came in green in this particular set. So you can choose a different roof piece, a different color for the roof (the piece is available in white, black, yellow, red, and light-gray), or build the entire vehicle in a different color to match the roof (I’m building mine in all black).
The LEGO Creator Winter Village series also includes some very nice classic style vehicles. The #10222 LEGO Creator Winter Village Post Office comes with a charming old mail delivery truck, and the #10229 LEGO Creator Winter Village Cottage with an old style flatbed truck that can be converted into a snowplow. This second vehicle in particular can be repurposed to build so many different classic trucks!
The LEGO Indiana Jones theme is a goldmine for classic cars. This series has been retired, so it might be difficult to track down the original sets for a reasonable price, but again, the instructions are readily available online. The #7682 LEGO Indiana Jones Shanghai Chase includes an absolutely fantastic cloth-top car in tan, and a black sedan. The #7683 LEGO Indiana Jones Fight on the Flying Wing comes with an old style fuel truck. The #7628 LEGO Indiana Jones Peril in Peru got a simple little jeep and tractor in classic style. And there is a more complex jeep, and an old style truck in the #7622 LEGO Indiana Jones Race for the Stolen Treasure.
There is also a really sweet classic style Ford Hot Rod in the #75875 LEGO Speed Champions Ford F-150 Raptor & Ford Model A Hot Rod set. Perhaps you can add this to a garage in your city, or someone tinkering with it in the alley behind the Modular Buildings. This set is currently available under the LEGO Speed Champions section of the Online LEGO Shop. Speaking of classic-style Hot Rods, the #10200 LEGO Factory Custom Car Garage set includes three (see below)!
As you can see, there are quite a few classic LEGO vehicles in official LEGO sets that look excellent. And of course you can also find pictures of many more old-style cars made by LEGO fans on various image sharing sites, LEGO forums and blogs, that you can use for inspiration. But if you need a bit of help to get started, or you just want to get some classic-style vehicles added to your city without having to design them on your own, you can certainly use the models provided by LEGO. All you need is pick the vehicle you like, use the set number to find the building instructions, gather the parts from your LEGO collection or buy them on BrickLink, and start building!
What do you think? How do you like these classic LEGO cars found in official LEGO sets? Do you have any of them already? Have you considered adding old-style cars to your LEGO Modular city? Are there any other classic LEGO vehicles that you really like and would recommend? Feel free to share and discuss in the comment section below! 😉
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Great topic! Nice examples! I forgot about those great classic cars in the Winter Village sets. One other theme that could be added to the list with classic cars is Pharaoh’s Quest. They are simple, but come with a nice dark red color scheme, and have many of the features of classic cars. Good starter models. I’m curious to see your black version of the Superman car.
Oh, yes! Pharaoh’s Quest! I forgot about those! I really like the dark-red – very classic car-ish. And the shaping looks good on them too. The vehicles are smaller than some of the other examples, but they could work great as seed ideas. Thanks for mentioning them. 🙂
I’m just waiting to get a black roof piece for my Superman car. Otherwise it is done. I’m also building a tan and dark-tan combo, and a medium-blue version. I carefully looked at the parts and what colors they appear in, and there are other colors and combinations that can be done too: yellow, bright-light-orange, red, blue, dark-blue, dark-red, green, and even lime. I think yellow/bright-light-orange, blue/dark-blue, red/dark-red, and green/dark-green combos would also look great. I also considered making a yellow taxi with checkered stickers, but the car can only seat one minifigs, so I decided against it. Anyway, I will share the ones I made when I’m done. 🙂
If you make the Superman car open top can you put in a second minifig? That might be an interesting variation. I really like the postal truck and the Ford hotrod. Those can also be built in different colors to create variety.
That’s a good idea with making an open top version. I will try that. 🙂
Another place to find some older style cars is the Monster Hunters Sets
That’s sand-green car in Monster Fighters is gorgeous! 😀
Interesting article. I never thought about building a classic car. Might try it. And I really would have liked some Indiana Jones sets. 🙁 I found a few other sets with older-style vehicles in them: #40083 Christmas Tree Truck, a Seasonal set from 2013 (although it might not be classic), City #60048 Police Dog Unit and #4438 Robbers’ Hideout, with a hot-rod each, and “Hot Rod Club” (#6561) from 1994, although I doubt that would be good for copying, given the set’s age. 😕
Those are nice ones too! I like the Christmas truck especially. It is kind of a modern truck with a classic style, and looks good. I might build that one too. 🙂
Hey, admin, I know this is off-topic, but may I ask you, how do you host this website? I’m thinking about making one of my own but I do not know any good ways to host it.
There are two ways you can host your website or blog; free or paid. Blogger and Wordpress.com are two popular places to host a free site, and there are many more. You have limited options on what you can do with your site, but you don’t need technical knowledge to run them. You just fill in blanks, pick colors and layout, and you are ready to go. If you just want to casually blog they are great.
Paid websites for bloggers are usually run using Wordpress.org. Meaning you use their interface, which is free, but you have to have your own hosting. You can get good shared hosting for around $5 a month. When you just start out there is really no need for more. If you plan to blog seriously, starting out with a paid option is better because you have full control over pretty much every aspect of your website. As your traffic grows you can easily switch over to more expensive options with a larger capacity for handling traffic. We used shared hosting for almost two years before we changed over to a virtual private server.
Hope this helps some. If you have any other questions feel free to ask. 🙂
Thank you so much for your time and answer! I am thinking about and working on ideas for a website/community for TFOLs and AFOLs with a live chat/forum (maybe a live forum, idk). Fans can share animations and MOCs with a whole organized collection of lego fans’ youtube channels and videos. Maybe at one point if it gets big enough I’ll partner with companies to supply creators with resources. It also allows people to donate lego or money to other TFOLs and AFOLs (mainly TFOLs because they have it the hardest in my opinion) who don’t have enough for creative projects such as stop motion animation and MOCs. Maybe I could get a whole system to ship donated lego or money to other lego fans. I’m trying to make the whole Lego community get closer to each other. This might be really hard to do, though. I may be getting ahead of myself or just dreaming, but I will do my best to try and make this happen.
Oh, I see what you are trying to do. Nice idea! So what you will need is not wordpress, but a forum software. There are two main ones; the one used by EuroBricks (which is the more traditional) and the other one is used by Brickset called Vanilla Forums.
A busy forum can take up tremendous amount of resources, both in bandwidth and in storage. So make sure you come up with a way to generate income. It could be something simple as ads or some kinds of affiliation.
You can build up your site slowly and steadily so there is not too much strain on your own time and budget. Try it out with a few people to make sure everything works, then once you are ready for more members you can reach out to various LEGO communities to announce your services.
Thanks for the advice. I will take it to heart and use while trying to make this idea come to life.
Sure, you are welcome. Looking forward to see your community! 🙂
Those hot rods look more interesting than the regular Speed Champions…
And for some reason, there was a rather classical look to the Fabuland cars, a somewhat roaring 20-30ish style…
You’re right about Fabuland! I haven’t thought of those at all! But I haven’t seen them in real life either. All I have is one Fabuland cow I got on BrickLink. Would love to get some of the sets though. 😀
I would love to have a classic car collection similar to Speed Champions! Another nice feature of the little hot rod is that it has printed doors! So yeah, those flames are printed! 😀
Almost like those blocky car models of the 70’s…
Thanks to this article yesterday I bought the Speed Champions Chevy Camero Drag Race set. Hey, a ’69 Camero isn’t terribly old, but I think it can be classified as a classic. 😉
Rob, funny, I was just looking at that set myself yesterday. The ’69 Camero looks particularly good, and neither cars have that many stickers compared to some of the other ones.
Fewer stickers was also a selling point for me as with fewer stickers like with the Cameros they fit well as street cars in my modular city layout. Ya don’t see too many race/track cars driving around town! 🙂
That lego hot rod is awesome! Nice to see lego doing some historic vehicles, in addition to all the spaceships and superheroes.