We may mock President Putin as regularly as we can create a tenuous link to his dickwittery, but the country he dictates is an amazing one. Spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific across eleven time zones, responsible for the first animal, satellite, and person in space, and with a history uniting fifteen separate countries into one bloc of… er, communist misery, Russia and the former Soviet Union are a major part of our current world.
They also make probably the best off-road trucks of anyone, which are needed to traverse a vast and wild landscape, with most having their roots in the Military. Founded in 1956, off-road truck-maker Ural shares this history, and still employs 4,000 people today building trucks like this, Vladimir Drozd‘s beautifully presented Ural crane truck.
With a working crane that rotates, elevates, extends, and winches, Vladimir’s Ural functions as good as it looks, and there’s loads more of his superb model to see at his ‘Ural Crane Truck’ album on Flickr. Take a look via the link above, or here for a tenuous link to Putin’s dickwittery.
The future of BMW M-cars is electric. And automatic. The current M2 is already confirmed to be the final manual M-car, and – if the horrendous new BMW XM is any indication – the future of BMW’s M-division looks fat, almost comically ostentatious, and immensely, unfathomably, ludicrously ugly. Make your own ‘Your Mom’ joke.
Which is probably why the original 1980s BMW ‘E30’ M3, weighing under 1,200kgs and powered by a four-cylinder engine that made less than 200bhp, is being seen as something of an antidote to the overblown ridiculousness of today’s M-cars.
This lovely Technic recreation of BMW’s M-car high water mark was found on Eurobricks, and comes from previous bloggee apachaiapachai. There’s remote control drive and steering courtesy of LEGO’s Control+ motors and app, opening doors, and that’s it. Which makes it every bit as wonderfully simple as the real E30 M3.
There’s more to see at the Eurobricks forum, and you can take a look via the link above.
One of the coolest liveries in motorsport has got to be Toyota’s diagonal sunset-coloured TRD striping. Seemingly unchanged since the ’80s, said livery has appeared on everything from NASCARs to Baja trucks, and it’s the latter we have here today.
Built by SpaceHopper, this superb Toyota T100 Baja off-road truck features Control+ remote control drive and steering, working suspension, a fully-caged interior, stunning attention to detail, and – most importantly – a simply brilliant recreation of Toyota’s famous TRD livery.
There’s more of Space’s Toyota T100 Baja model to see at both Flickr and Eurobricks, and you make the jump somewhere in the desert via the links above.
Porsche – as per Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Lamborghini and almost every automotive brand – are today mostly an SUV manufacturer. Sigh.
But they haven’t abandoned their roots quite as much as would first appear, as they – like Lamborghini – have off-road vehicles as much a part of their early history as their current line-up.
Many of these were of a military purpose designed for a certain moustachioed maniac, which Porsche don’t seem keen to highlight in their corporate history, but Porsche also built tractors, such as this rather cute Porsche-Diesel Standard 218.
Powered by a two-cylinder 25bhp air-cooled diesel engine, the Standard 218 could be outrun by even the fattest TLCB Writer, but unlike the fattest TLCB Writer it could also lift over half-a-ton on its three-point-hitch.
This lovely Model Team replica of the Porsche-Diesel Standard 218 recreates the tractor (and hitch) beautifully, with superb attention to detail paid in particular to the Porsche’s visible mechanical parts.
TLCB newcomer dimnix is the builder behind it, and there’s more to see of this excellent classic Porsche-Diesel at their Brickshelf gallery. Click the link above to jump back to when an off-road Porsche didn’t mean an aggressively-driven Cayenne.
Like the Ford F-150 in America, the Honda Super Cubin East Asia, and the Toyota Corolla almost everywhere, the Mitsubishi Fuso Canter is background street furniture for a huge proportion of the world.
Built in half-a-dozen countries, across eight generations and six decades, and re-badged as a Hyundai, Nissan, plus a host of other brands, the Canter is one of the most widespread and ubiquitous vehicles on the planet.
This one is a fifth generation fridge truck version, as used in their thousands to deliver food produce in the world’s restaurant back-streets. It comes from Max Ra of Flickr, who has recreated the Canter brilliantly, picking out the details of what is essentially a white box to create an instantly-recognisable brick-built replica.
There’s more of the model to see at Max’s ‘Mitsubishi Canter 5th Generation Refrigerated Truck’ album, and you can take a look at all the images via the link in the text above.
This impressive looking rotator wrecker tow-truck was discovered by one of our Elves on Flickr. It comes from regular bloggee Ralph Savelsberg (aka Mad Physicist), who is usually found building models rather larger, yet despite being only nominally mini-figure scale, Ralph’s wrecker packs in an astounding amount of detail.
This isn’t just visual either, as the truck’s towing boom can elevate, rotate and winch, and there’s more of the model to see at Ralph’s photostream. Click the first link link in the text above to head there, you can check out Ralph’s Master MOCers interview via the second, and click here for the LEGO Model Team set that may have provided some inspiration.
Diversity is the corporate buzzword of the 2020s. Here at The Lego Car Blog we’re not one to be left behind, so proving our diverse nature is this, a Hanta Machinery BP31W5 asphalt paver.
Yes this website might usually feature giant trucks or racing cars, but without machines like the BP31W5, we – as a society – would be nowhere. That’s probably a metaphor for something…
Anyway, whilst we figure out if we’ve accidentally written something curiously insightful, you can see more of the BP31W5 courtesy of Y Akimeshi of Flickr; click the link to pave the way.
LEGO’s Speed Champions range has brought some fantastic replicas of awesome real-world cars into pocket-money brick-built attainability. And a Lamborghini Urus.
LEGO also recently increased the scale of their Speed Champions sets, taking the range from six-studs in width to eight, bringing a corresponding improvement in detail too. But even at eight studs wide, the official Speed Champions sets are no match for this…
Built by TLCB debutant Szunyogh Balázs (aka gnat.bricks), this beautiful Shelby Mustang GT350 – complete with a superbly detailed engine under an opening hood, and even a realistic drivetrain – amazingly measures only eight studs in width, yet packs in Model Team levels of realism.
It’s possibly the finest Speed Champions creation that we’ve seen yet, and there’s much more to see of Szunyogh’s Shelby GT350 on Flickr. Click the link above to take a closer look, or here to see LEGO’s own (six-wide) Speed Champions Mustang to appreciate just how good Szunyogh’s version is.
It’s Sci-Friday here at The Lego Car Blog, a minor space-based event that occurs whenever we remember that sci-fi exists and we can’t think of another post title. Cue the sci-fi!
The first science-fictiony creation (above) comes from Blake Foster of Flickr, who has reimagined his previous ‘Cargo Critter’ build later on in the craft’s life, wherein it’s a bit rustier, and a whole lot more cyberpunk. Jump into a rusty neon future via the link!
Today’s second sci-fi build is multiple creations in one, as yu chris expands his excellent space-in-a-box design that debuted with Classic Space to the villains of LEGO’s vintage space world; Blacktron.
Featuring a huge eight-wheel crawler base, several lunar rovers, spacecraft, and even a jail, all of which pack neatly inside a brick-built carry-case, it’s a the most play-packed space build we’ve seen yet, and you can join the fun via the link above!
And finally, today’s third sci-fi build comes from previous bloggee Rubblemaker, whose creepy ‘Symbiosis’ spacecraft harnesses the power of lifeforms for its propulsion. That mini-figure is no pilot. Still, at least he gets to see the universe whilst the life is sucked out of him! Head Rubble’s Flickr album via the link above and hope you’re not next in line for a journey through space…
The world’s greatest motor race celebrates its century this weekend. Founded in 1923 on a public road loop around the village of Le Mans, a route that would later become today’s ‘Circuit de la Sarthe’, the 24 Heures du Mans remains the pinnacle of endurance racing.
Of course due to some German expansionist policies in the late 1930s, the 2023 event is not the one hundredth running of the race, rather the 91st, but nevertheless it’s going to be a special year, with both a notable increase in Hypercar competition and the final year of the GTE class before it’s replaced by the more widely adopted GT3 regulations.
Flickr’s SpaceMan Nathan is celebrating Le Mans’ centenary, and the final year of GTE, with this lovely recreation of the Circuit de la Sarthe pitlane, complete with five Speed Champions GTE AM cars. Accurate liveries and trackside sponsorship add to the ambience, and you can enter the pitlane at Le Mans’ centenary year via the link above to watch the GTE finale.
NYC taxi cabs seem to be less, well… cabby these days. Toyota RAV4 hybrids and electric Nissan vans have taken over from the classic V8-powered three-box sedans, which is of course excellent news for air quality. And quite probably ride quality. But somehow less… cabby.
Of course we’re talking nonsense, because the old three-box sedans weren’t bespoke taxis like London’s ‘Black Cabs‘ anymore than a RAV4 is, and thus you were just as likely to see them being driven by the elderly in Florida as you were in yellow NYC form.
However even now, if asked to picture a NYC yellow cab, we would still think of a shape (and era) like this.
The Chevrolet Caprice was one of several V8-powered three-box sedans used for taxi duty in New York before their electrified replacements arrived, with this superb brick-built version being a 1989 example.
Constructed by previous bloggee Jakub Marcisz, the model captures the classic cab brilliantly, including four opening doors, hood and trunk, working steering, a detailed engine bay and interior, and some wonderfully authentic NYC Taxi License decals.
There’s much more of this Chevrolet Caprice NYC cab to see at Jakub’s photostream, and you can hail a ride in New York sometime in the 1990s via the link in the text above.
*Today’s title song(a cover version that features (we think) this very Chevrolet Caprice taxi in the video. Points for us!).
Here at The Lego Car Blog we are definitely petrol-heads. And electric-heads perhaps too. We like cars is what we’re trying to say.
Because of this, we prefer our cars with rear-wheel-drive and manual gearboxes, for reasons of steering feel, the ability to go sideways a bit, and other nerdy car things that normal people couldn’t care less about. Which is why front-wheel-drive matters.
Creating safer, more predictable (understeery) handling, greater interior room, and better refinement, front-wheel-drive has been the absolute norm for anything that isn’t sporty for the past four decades.
Even brands famed for their rear-wheel-drive chassis like BMW have switched to front-wheel-drive for their smaller models, after learning their customers had no idea that their 1-Series was rear-wheel-drive, or even what being rear-wheel-drive means. Sigh.
Front-wheel-drive was dabbled with in the early years of motoring, but this is the car that proved the layout, decades before it became mainstream. It is the fabulous Citroen Traction Avant.
Possessing not just front-wheel-drive, but also the first mass-produced monocoque body and early rack-and-pinion steering, the Traction Avant was so advanced it was produced for two decades, something that was needed as its development bankrupted the Citroen company in the mid 1930s.
Today the Traction Avant is seen as the father of front-wheel-drive, and therefore most new cars on sale today (even if your car is all-wheel-drive, it’s still almost always only front-driven).
It’s surprising then that the Traction Avant has only featured here twice in a decade of publishing Lego vehicles. Cue this wonderful and much overdue Technic recreation of one of the world’s most innovative cars, as built by the very talented Nico71.
Beautifully replicating the Traction Avant’s ’30s styling, Nico’s model includes a working four-cylinder engine under the split-folding hood, four opening doors and an opening trunk, working steering, and – of course – front-wheel-drive.
The complexities of front-wheel-drive mean that – much like cars before about 1980 – very few Lego models adopt it, favouring the simplicity of a rear-driven axle. Nico’s model successfully incorporates it however, and he’s released building instructions so you can see how to create front-driven Lego models for yourself.
There’s much more to see at Nico’s Brickshelf gallery, you can watch the model in action via the video below, plus you can find out how Nico creates beautifully engineered models like this one via his Master MOCers interview. Understeer your way to all the additional content via the links above.
This magnificent model is a Ural-4320 6×6 truck, a Soviet-era general purpose military truck first built in 1977, and still in production today.
Powered by a naturally-aspirated V8 diesel or a V6 turbodiesel, the Ural-4320 is very slow, but able to carry a variety of loads, from troops to rocket launchers, over almost any terrain. Well, unless the Russian Army recruits behind the wheel abandon them and run.
Which is what has occurred in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with over six-hundred Ural-4320s destroyed or abandoned, and around fifty captured a repurposed by the Ukrainian military, according to Dutch open-source intelligence group Oryx. Which is marvellous.
This phenomenal fully remote controlled Model Team recreation of the Ural-4320 comes from Russian builder and previous bloggee Michael217, who has brilliantly captured not just the aesthetics of the real truck, but also much of the driveline too.
A LEGO Buggy motor powers all six wheels, each of which is suspended and fitted with a portal axle, there’s Servo steering (that turns the steering wheel too), a high/low gearbox, opening doors and hood, a detailed engine, and an open load area ready to be fitted with a variety of Russian (or Ukrainian…) equipment.
There’s much more of Michael’s amazing model to see at the Eurobricks discussion forum, you can find the full image gallery at Bricksafe here, and you can watch the truck in action via the video below.
BuWizz – makers of the 5 star rated BuWizz 3.0 bluetooth control brick (and some monster motors too) – have powered hundreds of creations that have appeared here at The Lego Car Blog. From trucks to supercars, construction vehicles to off-roaders, BuWizz bricks have gone into every vehicle type imaginable, bringing programmable bluetooth remote control and huge power.
If you’re a reader from BuWizz’s native Slovenia (or if you’d like to visit said country!), the BuWizz Gathering 2023 arrives in July of this year.
Held in a beautiful camp setting, the BuWizz Gathering features two days of competition (with a range of prizes on offer) with events such as Stadium Trucks, Off-Roaders and Sumo, plus food, drink, and leisure activities included.
Tickets are available now and you can find out what’s on offer in 2023 via the promotional video below.
