City vehicles

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

I've been designing a few city vehicles in stud.io which I plan to eventually create in real bricks in my city.

The latest and the one I'm most pleased with is a Dublin bus, not for its exterior but for the interior detail I squeezed into a 7-wide model. Minifigs certainly couldn't get up and walk around in it but there's the illusion that they might be able to :)
Here's the front:


Downstairs interior:


Upstairs interior:


Other vehicles include a 5-wide Renault Clio, a great little car or the bane of my life, depending on what day you ask me:


A Guinness keg truck to go with my pub moc:


Tony's Chevy Suburban from the Sopranos:


And finally Simon's Fiat Cinquecento (Hawaii Edition) from The Inbetweeners:


As always, more photos in the album.

I came up with a rough scale guide for myself a while back, which is approximately:
Small-to-medium cars 5-wide (the Cinquecento being a tiny exception)
Vans, SUVs and small trucks 6-wide
Large trucks and buses 7-wide

[David]

The hanging hand rail thingys in the bus is a great little detail.

Really like the Guinness lorry, looks brilliant. You could consider using the centre piece of some wheels perhaps for the metal kegs.

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

That's a great idea, I'll look into it, thanks David!

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

I've played around with a few keg designs, but aside from part 42610 most wheels are either much too big or not stackable. I've come up with a new design though, which I think works quite well. These technically aren't stackable either but the illusion of stacks of them can be built.

[John]

Bus is nice but this opens the door for the 8widers, 6wide city bus staggers the seats. The truck wheels are what all bigger than cars wheels should have been to have some semblance of scale. The 8wide cars now make everything look silly. Clio looks old school lego cars in a good way(at least not 4wide!)

[David]

Some Dublin Buses have 6 wheels with 4 at the rear. Think it would look better with 6. Is there no blue arch, 1x6 or some more rounded alternative mudguard piece that you could use? You could put in a petrol tank cover. Some great techniques used from what I can see.

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

I think the 8-widers would look very wrong next to a 7-wide bus, don't worry John, I won't be going down that route! I'll have to try and shrink the Little Black Cat down to 7-wide too, I'd love to put it in the city one day...

Don't think I could fit in 6 wheels without extending it, or it would just look a bit funny. I didn't base this off any particular type of bus really so I wasn't going for massive realism. Had a look at arches and unfortunately they would get in the way of a lot of essential structural parts, and the vehicle mudguards are too deep, they interfere with the very limited interior space and with the stairs. But the inverted slopes give it a nice classic Lego town kind of look that I quite like anyway :)

[legocardi]

Love the Guinness truck. Although it would have to called a Murphys truck in my Lego town or I would be excommunicated.

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

I should actually excommunicate myself too now you mention it, although I'm more partial to a Beamish... good thing there's no actual branding on it!

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

Following on from Simon's Fiat Cinquicento (Hawaii Edition) and Tony Sopranos Chevy Suburban, I present another TV vehicle: Dennis Reynolds' "amphibious exploring vehicle", the Range Rover (c. 1993 model).

Dark green doesn't quite capture the colour, but I think it's the closest Lego has. It's somewhere between dark grey, dark green and olive green.

[John]

Alf Stewart is all I think of when I see these landrovers, looks really like the actual, lego makes lots of landrover stylized 4x4s ,they did a discovery lookalike one before which I like but there's a new safari one out which has great accessories and it looks great too. It'll be in my hit list

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

Yeah the safari one looks really nice! Questionable choice of disguise for the minifig dressed as a tree to photograph a lioness though...

[John]

Nike shoes might give him a chance, but luckily the jaws don't open on lioness ,are you building these designs?

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

I will one of these days! Currently the city isn't really a city, just 3 buildings on a table, but when I get the roads back down I'll need some traffic, and I'd prefer if it was mostly MOCs!

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

Here are some more designs for city vehicles that I've been doing over the last several months. Hopefully these will all get built later this year!

An ambulance:




Back to the theme of TV vehicles (pushing it a bit), Super Hans' van from Peep Show. You half see it about twice, and I was just about able to make out that it's probably a Ford Transit Connect:




A Centra truck, DAF 75. I love doing Lego lettering :)




Finally a Citroen C4 Cactus. We ditched the Clio this year and upgraded to a more family-suitable car with some pretty distinctive features! Unfortunately this one isn't currently buildable, I'll be waiting for Lego to release one of these inverted slopes in dark bluish grey (currently ONLY available in light bluish grey and appearing in only 2 sets so a very new part - no doubt there will be some new colours soon).