That's the key. In order for a car to retain accurate proportions to a real-life car, it either has to has to be the 'right' height and length when compared to a standing minifig and only fit one minifig, or if you want to fit two minifigs, it has to be way too tall and long when compared to a standing minifig. You can't have it both ways with how minifigs are proportioned.
@@ifoundoneavailable Actually it is possible to fit Minifigures side by side in a 6-wide, but you still don't get the same level of detail or space. I mostly build 8-wides (custom ones) but have built a couple 6-wides as an experiment. The 6-wide version has two static front seats, the 8-wide has folding front seats to allow people to get to the two rear seats, plus a gear shift and handbrake.
@@ifoundoneavailable Pulling off an arm of each of them does allow for slightly more realistic proportions for a two seater in my experience, but I also have a good number of missing arms now so.... there's that.
The new speed champions sets are a quantum leap forward. I love them. Finally cars that fit minifigures sitting side by side. And the exteriors are far superior to the old speed champions. I've also started to collect them. Never felt like doing that with the old ones. If it were up to me, TLG would produce wider roads to accommodate this size.
The designers already addressed this (can’t remember exactly where). The advantages of larger cars outweigh the disadvantage of not fitting in regular cities. They’re meant for display, not play.
I love them, it was always a bit silly only being able to fit 1 minifig in a car. Backwards compatibility is a problem, but I'm sure Lego will eventually produce new road baseplates to match it if this becomes the standard going forward, and even without that its pretty easy (if tedious) to just build a road. With things like the modular buildings series, having environments that minifigs can actually fit in in realistic ways has become more important
the new roadplates can be modified to be bigger actually. instead of using one road plate for a two lane road, use one road plate per lane and put the white lines in between the two road plates instead of in the middle of one. idk if i explained that well but it makes the roads the perfect size for the Speed Champion sets
@@TheCoolCucumber They already would change their road system every 5-10 years. The newest change is certainly the biggest, moving away from baseplates, but the old system still varied by style, width, and color.
Agreed. I immediately wasn't interested in the Corner Garage set since it couldn't fit 8 wide cars and the included tow truck only fit a single minifig.
as a person who doesnt own a lego city, I LOVE the new sets, literally building the koenigsegg as my typing this. love the detail and build design. great inspriational pieces to amke to go a bit more out of the box for my own builds
While true, as someone who has done some city planning I can say with confidence that the Lego plate roadways are narrower than even the most compact of European streets...
Exactly. The buildings are not realistic either. Nor is a minifig for that matter. So the extra realistic width of 8 studs cars are not for minifig city scale.
I think a new project you could focus on in your Lego city would be the haurbor, maybie extend the table a bit of you can and build a huge boat, like a cargo ship, a Ferry, a Cruise ship, that would be epic, and also Hard and expensive
The cars are getting wider and wider, almost too wide for some older street layouts … just like in real life! The problem with "minifig scale" imo is that minifigs are just way wider than real humans. Imagine if you wanted to build a train where four people can sit across and there's a walkway in the middle, that would be 20 studs wide! It's just not possible to build anything that looks realistic next to a minifig _and_ also fits a realistic amount of minifigs inside.
check out the Airbus 380 MOC . It is mini fig real size. it's 6 by 7 foot and it has 40,000 pieces and costs about $3000-$4000 to build. That is what building for mini fig size means.
Agreed, 6 wide is the best universal size/scale of a lego vehicle in my opinion. Allows just enough space for realistic models, while still fitting in. 8 wide speed champions models I think are way too massive...
@@dallasfrost1996 you are wrong for a city or large display like a city. Speed champions is made for collecting and realistic looks for the cars. Overall I really like the 8-stud models but it is up to you.
@@squiddysquidster802 To each their own, I realize that speed champions models are meant more as display models, however I thought the 6 wide models for the most part were perfectly fine. There definitely was room for improvement. Personally, I don't think 8 wide really makes that much of a difference in a few cases. In fact in some cases, 8 wide looks worse than 6 wide, an example of that would be the Nissan GTR from last years speed champions line. Looks really out of proportion, and to its general scale. There are a couple more recent 8 wide speed champions sets that have suffered from that actually...
I don't really see how "fitting in a lego city" would be a strong argument cause I think most lego enthusiasts don't have a lego city. Also, is there really just one standard lego city size ? I guess if you use mini figs and road plates you don't really have the choice... But yeah, I'm more into technic cars and I just bought the new huge mercedes truck which is 48 cm long, so I really don't think lego cars are too big, lol. Even if I'm not sure if at this point technics and legos are 2 different things sold by the same brand.
I agree. Once you put them all on the shelf, that’s when I noticed how big they actually are. (Took up the whole shelf) They are huge compared to the city. The little cars look so good!
Couldn't agree with you more. I think both the City/Town and Speed Champions design philosophies have their own place and don't necessarily need to overlap, just as long as they're both given their own spot in the limelight.
Everything I see in this video is how I imagined I wanted my Lego collection to be. Even the old Offroad ones too! My first and favorite Lego set I built using spare parts was a truck with the spring axles
I love the speed champions line. I think it’s nice, imo of course, that we finally have vehicles that can fit two minifigs side by side. I have a race car set from 91 that next to my speed champions looks like a go cart. I think we’ll start seeing Lego come out with more “appropriately” sized lego city add-ables in the near future. We’re already seeing it in the city theme vehicles having an almost uniform 6 stud witdth. The new road plates will also help both older city builders and those just jumping in by allowing ultimate customization for cars of many widths. All in all, I see the larger scale as a good thing with a few drawbacks that you fairly and accurately pointed out in your video.
IMO LEGO cars have always felt like go-karts. Even the couple 6-wides I've built that can accommodate 2 figs side by side still look like a golf-cart because of how big the heads of the Minifigures are. They look really nice sitting in an 8-wide, and I can fit like 6 Figs in a minivan! Course when they aren't in the car and are instead just standing next to it, yeah, 8-wides look huge! And there is also the issue of LEGO trains being only 6 wide (or 8, in the case of my custom ones).
Here's the lego vehicle width I recommend: 4 studs - Small, tiny cars, like smart cars or Kei cars. 6 studs - Normal car, 2 Minifigures can sit side-by-side in a 6 stud width through the use of jumper plates. 8 studs - Only reserved for big vehicles, like trucks or buses.
I totally agree. I still love the elegance and simplicity of those early 1980s cars. Though some of those newer 6-stud wide cars and particularly vans and trucks (where it's more appropriate) also look really nice and natural, if slicker and smoother than the older cars. We don't have any of the speed racers, but we do have 60148, a pickup with quad bikes. I was appalled to discover that the bed of the truck was 8 studs wide to accommodate the (wider than 4 studs) quad bike. That's just too wide. Please just make the quad bike 4 studs wide at most, so it can fit in a 6 stud wide bed.
I'm so happy someone brought this up. For me as well, I grew up when cars where 4 studs wide. And then they became 6 studs wide. But 6 stud wide cars/trucks with the wider tires are 7+ studs wide. And that is, in my opinion the maximum you should have in your city. Cars should never be wider than 6 studs and trucks/buses should be less than 8 studs.
I think they're a more accurate scale if you go by minifig width instead of height. You can fit two figs side by side without things being super cramped, just like most real life cars.
To me it's simple: I'm never going to afford the money to buy a large enough house to build a Lego city, so a display cabinet is the best I can afford, and these are perfect displaying pieces
Even being put in a modern setting, no way a sports car would usually be that big compared to a person, these low cars are like the same height as the mini-figures lol
As a car guy who havent bought lego since childhood , these 8 stud wide designs really got me into lego again and i started collecting them, to the extent that i hunt 6 stud old speed champions models to convert them to 8 which is fun. Its just more detailed and interesting for real life car represenationts to be more realistic and have 2 figures seats .
The problem is actually mini-figures and trying to scale vehicles to them. Mini-figs are too short for their width, or if you prefer, too wide for their height. So trying to scale any vehicle to a mini-figure means you have to make some strange compromises, hence vehicles that are out-of-proportion. The new speed champions cars look much more realistic, but they are out of proportion to mini-figs.
Definitely too big for use with their new(ish) road plate system that was introduced at the start of the year. I found it funny that as they were widening the speed champion cars.. they narrowed the roads.
I modify all of my vehicles to 4studs wide while keeping realism a priority. Fire trucks and ambulances stay 6studs wide but any other vehicle stay 4studs wide.
I bought a couple of those earlier Speed Champions sets, and they look good from certain angles, but I hated how narrow they are. It ruined their attempt to accurately portray real-life vehicles, and it's weird to have only space for one figure. It's particularly noticable on exotic supercars which are supposed to be low and wide. I wasn't aware that newer models have expanded their width, but that's exactly what they needed. You can still get narrow, one man vehicles in the City theme, so they will keep old-school city-builders happy, whereas the Speed Champions look great on display (or you could make a special racetrack for them.) In general I feel that Lego has been scaling their vehicles down, and they lost their appeal to me. Around the early 2000s I got some awesome Construction and Coast Guard sets, but more recently they released revised versions of the same vehicles which were only two thirds the size, and just seemed too tiny and basic for me. I do understand that they are trying to keep costs down, and large parts of the company's history they have been skirting the border of unprofitability.
As a big fan of sports cars and muscle cars, I love the new details and realism that the 8 stud wide cars bring to the Lego market. It's unfortunate that these new designs aren't compatible with Minifigure scale builds, but at the same time this amount of detail wouldn't be possible on 4-6 wide builds. I would love to see Lego release some Speed Champions road tiles so we could fit these beautiful cars into a city that works with the new sizes.
They are not getting too big. They are finally reaching a realistic size. My moc cars are all 6, 8 and even 10 studs wide for trucks. It might seem huge but speed champions already did this with the Ferrari F1 truck. I think realism is everyone's main goal when building using Legos. This day finally came true. Sitting 2 Minifigures next to each other properly was very hard when we were 8 because the possibilities were limited to only 1. This new generation of builders is very lucky.
I’m just planning my first Lego street and I’m going to build the roads to accommodate the speed champions as I absolutely love them, and can’t believe how much they have advanced compared to when I was a kid.
The 8-8.5 wide cars look so good and so much more accurate than the 6 wide ones. It’s unfortunate that they don’t really fit on the roads they sell, but they’re much better as individual sets
tbh im glad speed champions are 8 wide. more space for details, and figs being able to sit side by side is something that makes these cars feel more real. finally have reason to build another lego than just technic and really specialized models like creator mustang or architecture.
Heh, it’s funny how most things in Lego are out of proportion, including roads, tires, rooms, etc. Don’t even get me started, I own a Lego Ninjago set from the season 4, which is a giant truck-like portable base where there are plenty of space for a motorcycle, but there are still just a bit of space for 6 minifigures, which created a bit of problems when I was a kid, and also the same it is for the Chima S1 lion castle and Nexo knights S1 P2 Jestro’s lava fortress.
Yeah I was kind of heartbroken when Speed Champion went to 8 studs. The 6 stud wide ones were the best looking vehicles in my lego city. And nothing beats that wonderful Speed Champions Mini Cooper. The new cars are worthless for City display.
I agree with your point of view. I have every speed champion set since they were released, to go in my LEGO City Until... They went 8-wide Now I only get specific ones that interest me, and only for display.
in my opinion the new 8 wide chassis are more accurate. Because in real life most cars can fit 2 people side by side. So i think the standart City sets are undersized. :D
The problem is the proportions of minifigs. Sure, the new speed champions cars can fit 2 minifigs, but they're so massive that they tower above standing minifigs, when a true minifig scale supercar would realistically not even reach a minifig's shoulder.
When I got my first minifig in the Shell Fuel Pumper truck in 1978, the minifig didn’t even fit in the vehicle. And when they eventually did make 4 stud wide cars that a minifig could sit in, I wondered if they were supposed to be go carts since they were so tiny and fit only one minifig. While I did like the 6 stud speed champions they still never looked proportionally correct. 8 studs are a huge leap forward in terms of realistic proportions. Just build wider roads
The speed champions are my favorite LEGO sets. I think the 8 stud size is perfect for them. It's the perfect collectible for someone who really likes cars, in my opinion.
I think that speed champions were made to create a series that offered great details and amazing building techniques, but were also not meant for a Lego city, Or any set at all really, I think that these Lego sets lean more on the imaginative side, like making them race at high speed with each other, running in an either total imaginative track, or in custom built tracks, and were also made for display, so yes, they are getting bigger for the cross-sets playing, but are normal size to play with each of them, also a street circuit in your city could be an idea😉
It’s only because LEGO figs are short, the cars are actually a good size ( have you seen real cars compared to people they are pretty big) and road plates need to be updated
Having two seats on the new ones is amazing! It's what got me into Speed Champions. The only thing that bugs me is that hairpieces are very restricted because of the low profile.
In late 2002 When Lego released it's 2nd wave of Lego Harry Potter sets based on "Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets", One set included a car based on the 1960's ford Anglia model. The car in this set was 6 studs wide. What made it so easy to fit 2 figures together was that the car was designed with flat tile pieces where the figures would sit down and a type hook piece would stick between the figure to ensure that they would stay more still. The only times figures would slip out of position would if some were to tip the car over. Other than that, it was probably the perfect size car, even enough to inspire to build a similar car with back seats.
Hey, thank you for the video. I like the design of these new speed champions cars, but for me, they don't have that magic feeling, that smaller cars have. They are just too big. I like Lego 2-sit cars because they are quite natural in terms of the real world, but when I build something like this, I try to keep it within 6 pins (7 if count mudguard ledges). And only some models that are supposed to be big are wider. E.g. something like a vintage Cadillac or a large pickup truck.
The vehicles in the City line of sets are still 4/6 studs wide, so LEGO is consistent there. I think the speed champions were never intended to be part of the city but more for a car enthusiast/collectors market. Therefore the LEGO designers did not care about how those sets integrate with the City line. From my point of view even the 6-wide speed champions do not integrate well. They are way too massive and too long in relation to City vehicles. When a Porsche 911 and an ice-cream truck share the same length then there is something wrong :-)
Totally agree with you...to be onest if you down scale a real car to minifig scale 1/48 or 1/50 the results are 5 studs for large cars and 7 studs for trucks and buses. I used this size for my city but working with 5 or 7 studs requires advanced techniques and more parts!!! Anyway nice video and nice city!
It would be nice if they made a new car base piece like the classic car body piece they used to have for oldtimers, where a tub shaped piece with two chairs and space for a gear stick. It had fixed doors but two minifigs fit side by side as close as possible
As a kid i was annoyed from the small cars and tryed to build bigger ones by myself. I gave up because my builds didnt have the stability. As a kid i would had loved this wider cars.
I stopped getting city sets years ago since it is nothing but police and fire stations since I already have one from the 1990's and I am happy with it and I still use them with today's buildings along with all the old cars and trains too.
Not only are the cars getting bigger, but the roads are getting smaller. At this point, if you want to use the new Lego road system and the new cars, you basically have to use one of those 16x16 plates as a single lane. Then it becomes comfortable for the cars. I've devised a system where you can even build the sidewalk out on top of the road plates by about 4 studs. You end up with 11 stud wide lanes, which are actually pretty decent for most cars. Small 4 stud wide cars might even be able to share the lane side by side, like some wide roads allow cars and motorcycles to do. I can show you the design if you're interested.
Yeah it takes a bigger car to fit 2, also I like how Lego made the Bronco 9- studs wide for scale,it was tones of fun,I even got inspired to make my own custom 9-stud wide behemoth.
I agree that six-stud cars are the sweet spot for LEGO City. Any wider, and they'd not only overextend the streets, but also be wider than LEGO trains! However, the new modular (system) baseplates provide the potential to build wider streets, if necessary. However, the eight-stud Speed Champions look great, so they should continue that width for detailed display models.
display of course! i even put the stickers on em....i only put stickers on stuff i dont plan to ever disasssemble. Those are gonna be forever on display. I get extra ones if i wanna disassemble them for their parts or use on my own builds.
The 8+ studs SC lineup is definitely display. Doesn’t fit at all on the road plates. Now, if you build a new city with brick-built roads or the new road plates that came out for 2020, you can make those wide enough to fit 8 stud wide vehicles. Most of your city will be roads, but it is more flexible in that way.
I think the speed champions are perfect and they've finally come to something close to a minifigure scale vehicle, they just haven't had the ability to step other sets up to that same scale for obvious reasons
The original 4-stud cars were also designed around the 1/87 scale of HO trail layouts. The mini-fig scale was a little off, but that was taken as a necessary evil. When the vehicles got pushed to 6-wide, they completely blew the proportionality of the HO scaling, and could not be used on the layouts. Many of us have Lego layouts, but sadly do not have more than one small bedroom for the assembly, so we use the standard 4x8 plywood as a base. With the Lego trains, and 6-wide cars, room is taken up very quickly, and it REALLY pushes the imagination to make the layouts interesting. Now that Lego is pressing their 8-wide builds, it will be really impractical to try to adopt that kind of scale our 4x8 layouts. So, unless we are buying sets like the Speed Champions for purely display models, those of us with small layouts will likely pass, and will build our own MOCs for our cities. Perhaps, it is actually better this way.
i have the set that the first minifigures came in and its copyright year is 1977 so i must have gotten one of the early early minifigs which is pretty cool, i even opened it out of the box to build it, it was a really cool find
I mean.. These newer speed champions were made for focus on real car detail and not to place in a city, but these could look really cool in a bigger area like a big parking lot car meet or something, or a track or something.
Yeah, the original speed champions scale was perfect, just enough space to pull of realistic models, while still being in scale with town, city scenes, and mini figures too!
I agree, the new cars aren’t minifig scale. I think 6-wide is optimal because you can still add a lot of detail and realism to them while keeping them approximately to the scale of minifigs
I totally get that the 8 studs speed champions don't fit in your city, you're right. I absolutely love the 8 studs though as they show much more detail and are ideal for display. I always thought that 6 studs wasn't enough and I absolutely hated that only one figure can sit in them.
I’d say it all revolves around the minifigures being grossly out of proportion for a scaled down human
That's the key. In order for a car to retain accurate proportions to a real-life car, it either has to has to be the 'right' height and length when compared to a standing minifig and only fit one minifig, or if you want to fit two minifigs, it has to be way too tall and long when compared to a standing minifig. You can't have it both ways with how minifigs are proportioned.
@@ifoundoneavailable Actually it is possible to fit Minifigures side by side in a 6-wide, but you still don't get the same level of detail or space. I mostly build 8-wides (custom ones) but have built a couple 6-wides as an experiment. The 6-wide version has two static front seats, the 8-wide has folding front seats to allow people to get to the two rear seats, plus a gear shift and handbrake.
@@ifoundoneavailable Pulling off an arm of each of them does allow for slightly more realistic proportions for a two seater in my experience, but I also have a good number of missing arms now so.... there's that.
@@scottthewaterwarrior Modern cars dont have gear shift nor handbrake hehehe 👍.
@@scottthewaterwarrior I found it!!! This is a six stud wide with a gear shift 👍👍👍😎 look this video ua-cam.com/video/vQF4O06SqJw/v-deo.html
I had assumed the speed champions were all more display pieces rather than being suitable for playing with other Lego sets.
I took that personally
@Shawn Stafford I am joking
yeah exactly
Yeah I’d prefer using them as display not for playing with other lego
Ye I don’t cares about displaying them. True Lego fans play with them
The new speed champions sets are a quantum leap forward. I love them. Finally cars that fit minifigures sitting side by side. And the exteriors are far superior to the old speed champions. I've also started to collect them. Never felt like doing that with the old ones. If it were up to me, TLG would produce wider roads to accommodate this size.
In my opinion. It lego best range they have today
i thought quantum was very small
I hate them. Not minifig scale friendly for a lego city
Agreed, have collected all of the new Speed Champions sets and they're all awesome.
8 studs wide is definitely the way going forward.
You can make six-stud wide cars that can fit two minifigures side-by-side. The cars in the Simpsons theme were designed that way.
The designers already addressed this (can’t remember exactly where). The advantages of larger cars outweigh the disadvantage of not fitting in regular cities. They’re meant for display, not play.
also car companies would allow lego to use cars more if the cars look better
OUTWEIGH*, not "out way".
I love them, it was always a bit silly only being able to fit 1 minifig in a car. Backwards compatibility is a problem, but I'm sure Lego will eventually produce new road baseplates to match it if this becomes the standard going forward, and even without that its pretty easy (if tedious) to just build a road. With things like the modular buildings series, having environments that minifigs can actually fit in in realistic ways has become more important
the new roadplates can be modified to be bigger actually. instead of using one road plate for a two lane road, use one road plate per lane and put the white lines in between the two road plates instead of in the middle of one. idk if i explained that well but it makes the roads the perfect size for the Speed Champion sets
I just buy a ton of black 1xwhatever bricks, along with some 1xwhatever yellow and white plates, and build my own roads by laying them on their sides.
@@TheCoolCucumber They already would change their road system every 5-10 years. The newest change is certainly the biggest, moving away from baseplates, but the old system still varied by style, width, and color.
Agreed. I immediately wasn't interested in the Corner Garage set since it couldn't fit 8 wide cars and the included tow truck only fit a single minifig.
as a person who doesnt own a lego city, I LOVE the new sets, literally building the koenigsegg as my typing this. love the detail and build design. great inspriational pieces to amke to go a bit more out of the box for my own builds
While true, as someone who has done some city planning I can say with confidence that the Lego plate roadways are narrower than even the most compact of European streets...
I think 8 studs wide is good for the extra-detailed Speed Champions sets, but the City vehicles should stay 4-6 studs wide
Exactly. The buildings are not realistic either. Nor is a minifig for that matter. So the extra realistic width of 8 studs cars are not for minifig city scale.
@@skywarp2414 actually u can use 8 wide cars in city. u just need to make your own roads, and that wide cx
I think a new project you could focus on in your Lego city would be the haurbor, maybie extend the table a bit of you can and build a huge boat, like a cargo ship, a Ferry, a Cruise ship, that would be epic, and also Hard and expensive
Good recommendation. I'll take a look at this possibility.
The cars are getting wider and wider, almost too wide for some older street layouts … just like in real life!
The problem with "minifig scale" imo is that minifigs are just way wider than real humans. Imagine if you wanted to build a train where four people can sit across and there's a walkway in the middle, that would be 20 studs wide! It's just not possible to build anything that looks realistic next to a minifig _and_ also fits a realistic amount of minifigs inside.
check out the Airbus 380 MOC . It is mini fig real size. it's 6 by 7 foot and it has 40,000 pieces and costs about $3000-$4000 to build. That is what building for mini fig size means.
What a great Lego car history lesson! Personally, I stick with the 6-stud cars and pass on anything bigger.
Agreed, 6 wide is the best universal size/scale of a lego vehicle in my opinion. Allows just enough space for realistic models, while still fitting in. 8 wide speed champions models I think are way too massive...
@@dallasfrost1996 you are wrong for a city or large display like a city. Speed champions is made for collecting and realistic looks for the cars. Overall I really like the 8-stud models but it is up to you.
@@squiddysquidster802 To each their own, I realize that speed champions models are meant more as display models, however I thought the 6 wide models for the most part were perfectly fine. There definitely was room for improvement. Personally, I don't think 8 wide really makes that much of a difference in a few cases. In fact in some cases, 8 wide looks worse than 6 wide, an example of that would be the Nissan GTR from last years speed champions line. Looks really out of proportion, and to its general scale. There are a couple more recent 8 wide speed champions sets that have suffered from that actually...
Agreed
I personally like the 8 stud wide cars since they look miles more like the actual car
unlike the 6 stud wide ones
I don't really see how "fitting in a lego city" would be a strong argument cause I think most lego enthusiasts don't have a lego city. Also, is there really just one standard lego city size ? I guess if you use mini figs and road plates you don't really have the choice... But yeah, I'm more into technic cars and I just bought the new huge mercedes truck which is 48 cm long, so I really don't think lego cars are too big, lol. Even if I'm not sure if at this point technics and legos are 2 different things sold by the same brand.
I agree. Once you put them all on the shelf, that’s when I noticed how big they actually are. (Took up the whole shelf) They are huge compared to the city. The little cars look so good!
“The vehicles looked like they were meant for 4 year olds.” Maybe because they were. Lego is a toy company and their target demographic is children.
Couldn't agree with you more. I think both the City/Town and Speed Champions design philosophies have their own place and don't necessarily need to overlap, just as long as they're both given their own spot in the limelight.
Makes the old cars look like go-karts
That was hilarious. Lol 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Everything I see in this video is how I imagined I wanted my Lego collection to be. Even the old Offroad ones too! My first and favorite Lego set I built using spare parts was a truck with the spring axles
Meanwhile Batman who's been breaking Lego City Road Laws since 2006
Me and my 10-wide (12 with the mirrors) Ben 10 Rust Bucket which takes up both lanes of even the widest road plates
I love the speed champions line. I think it’s nice, imo of course, that we finally have vehicles that can fit two minifigs side by side. I have a race car set from 91 that next to my speed champions looks like a go cart. I think we’ll start seeing Lego come out with more “appropriately” sized lego city add-ables in the near future. We’re already seeing it in the city theme vehicles having an almost uniform 6 stud witdth. The new road plates will also help both older city builders and those just jumping in by allowing ultimate customization for cars of many widths. All in all, I see the larger scale as a good thing with a few drawbacks that you fairly and accurately pointed out in your video.
IMO LEGO cars have always felt like go-karts. Even the couple 6-wides I've built that can accommodate 2 figs side by side still look like a golf-cart because of how big the heads of the Minifigures are. They look really nice sitting in an 8-wide, and I can fit like 6 Figs in a minivan! Course when they aren't in the car and are instead just standing next to it, yeah, 8-wides look huge! And there is also the issue of LEGO trains being only 6 wide (or 8, in the case of my custom ones).
Here's the lego vehicle width I recommend:
4 studs - Small, tiny cars, like smart cars or Kei cars.
6 studs - Normal car, 2 Minifigures can sit side-by-side in a 6 stud width through the use of jumper plates.
8 studs - Only reserved for big vehicles, like trucks or buses.
I totally agree. I still love the elegance and simplicity of those early 1980s cars. Though some of those newer 6-stud wide cars and particularly vans and trucks (where it's more appropriate) also look really nice and natural, if slicker and smoother than the older cars. We don't have any of the speed racers, but we do have 60148, a pickup with quad bikes. I was appalled to discover that the bed of the truck was 8 studs wide to accommodate the (wider than 4 studs) quad bike. That's just too wide. Please just make the quad bike 4 studs wide at most, so it can fit in a 6 stud wide bed.
I'm so happy someone brought this up.
For me as well, I grew up when cars where 4 studs wide. And then they became 6 studs wide. But 6 stud wide cars/trucks with the wider tires are 7+ studs wide. And that is, in my opinion the maximum you should have in your city. Cars should never be wider than 6 studs and trucks/buses should be less than 8 studs.
I think they're a more accurate scale if you go by minifig width instead of height. You can fit two figs side by side without things being super cramped, just like most real life cars.
Yeah, I personally think scaling by width rather than height is the way to go with lego.
To me it's simple: I'm never going to afford the money to buy a large enough house to build a Lego city, so a display cabinet is the best I can afford, and these are perfect displaying pieces
Even being put in a modern setting, no way a sports car would usually be that big compared to a person, these low cars are like the same height as the mini-figures lol
I agree with you . I enjoy the new larger cars there detail is truly fantastic, but they are not for my city. Six wide is the maximum.
yes i am all for a large racetrack set, track, stands, pits etc... for the larger speed champion sets, would be very cool !
As much as the large cars please me in both detail and functionality, I think the smaller cars are better for play and city building.
As a car guy who havent bought lego since childhood , these 8 stud wide designs really got me into lego again and i started collecting them, to the extent that i hunt 6 stud old speed champions models to convert them to 8 which is fun. Its just more detailed and interesting for real life car represenationts to be more realistic and have 2 figures seats .
The problem is actually mini-figures and trying to scale vehicles to them. Mini-figs are too short for their width, or if you prefer, too wide for their height. So trying to scale any vehicle to a mini-figure means you have to make some strange compromises, hence vehicles that are out-of-proportion. The new speed champions cars look much more realistic, but they are out of proportion to mini-figs.
Definitely too big for use with their new(ish) road plate system that was introduced at the start of the year. I found it funny that as they were widening the speed champion cars.. they narrowed the roads.
I modify all of my vehicles to 4studs wide while keeping realism a priority. Fire trucks and ambulances stay 6studs wide but any other vehicle stay 4studs wide.
I bought a couple of those earlier Speed Champions sets, and they look good from certain angles, but I hated how narrow they are. It ruined their attempt to accurately portray real-life vehicles, and it's weird to have only space for one figure. It's particularly noticable on exotic supercars which are supposed to be low and wide. I wasn't aware that newer models have expanded their width, but that's exactly what they needed. You can still get narrow, one man vehicles in the City theme, so they will keep old-school city-builders happy, whereas the Speed Champions look great on display (or you could make a special racetrack for them.)
In general I feel that Lego has been scaling their vehicles down, and they lost their appeal to me. Around the early 2000s I got some awesome Construction and Coast Guard sets, but more recently they released revised versions of the same vehicles which were only two thirds the size, and just seemed too tiny and basic for me. I do understand that they are trying to keep costs down, and large parts of the company's history they have been skirting the border of unprofitability.
I remember When Lego Cars Were Still 4 Bricks Wide They Stopped Production Of Making Those About 6 - 8 Years Ago And The Length Increased Greatly.
As a big fan of sports cars and muscle cars, I love the new details and realism that the 8 stud wide cars bring to the Lego market. It's unfortunate that these new designs aren't compatible with Minifigure scale builds, but at the same time this amount of detail wouldn't be possible on 4-6 wide builds. I would love to see Lego release some Speed Champions road tiles so we could fit these beautiful cars into a city that works with the new sizes.
This is why I want my future city to have tile brick roads. I feel the larger cars scale to minis better but at the trade off of space efficiency.
They are not getting too big. They are finally reaching a realistic size. My moc cars are all 6, 8 and even 10 studs wide for trucks. It might seem huge but speed champions already did this with the Ferrari F1 truck. I think realism is everyone's main goal when building using Legos. This day finally came true. Sitting 2 Minifigures next to each other properly was very hard when we were 8 because the possibilities were limited to only 1. This new generation of builders is very lucky.
In my opinion the best case for Lego cars are 4 stud system for civil cars and 6-stud for trucks and vans. Amazing video, thanks!
They really are
I’m just planning my first Lego street and I’m going to build the roads to accommodate the speed champions as I absolutely love them, and can’t believe how much they have advanced compared to when I was a kid.
Put the huge technic cars in the city lol
The 8-8.5 wide cars look so good and so much more accurate than the 6 wide ones. It’s unfortunate that they don’t really fit on the roads they sell, but they’re much better as individual sets
Not putting the stickers on your ford fiesta wrc is a crime against humanity
tbh im glad speed champions are 8 wide. more space for details, and figs being able to sit side by side is something that makes these cars feel more real. finally have reason to build another lego than just technic and really specialized models like creator mustang or architecture.
Heh, it’s funny how most things in Lego are out of proportion, including roads, tires, rooms, etc. Don’t even get me started, I own a Lego Ninjago set from the season 4, which is a giant truck-like portable base where there are plenty of space for a motorcycle, but there are still just a bit of space for 6 minifigures, which created a bit of problems when I was a kid, and also the same it is for the Chima S1 lion castle and Nexo knights S1 P2 Jestro’s lava fortress.
Yeah I was kind of heartbroken when Speed Champion went to 8 studs. The 6 stud wide ones were the best looking vehicles in my lego city. And nothing beats that wonderful Speed Champions Mini Cooper. The new cars are worthless for City display.
This is just like how cars are getting bigger in real life
Yo I have been watching you sinterklaas 2013 or so since I was a kid and yesterday I wanted to search back for you and today you are in my feed!
I agree with your point of view.
I have every speed champion set since they were released, to go in my LEGO City Until...
They went 8-wide
Now I only get specific ones that interest me, and only for display.
in my opinion the new 8 wide chassis are more accurate. Because in real life most cars can fit 2 people side by side. So i think the standart City sets are undersized. :D
The problem is the proportions of minifigs. Sure, the new speed champions cars can fit 2 minifigs, but they're so massive that they tower above standing minifigs, when a true minifig scale supercar would realistically not even reach a minifig's shoulder.
When I got my first minifig in the Shell Fuel Pumper truck in 1978, the minifig didn’t even fit in the vehicle.
And when they eventually did make 4 stud wide cars that a minifig could sit in, I wondered if they were supposed to be go carts since they were so tiny and fit only one minifig.
While I did like the 6 stud speed champions they still never looked proportionally correct.
8 studs are a huge leap forward in terms of realistic proportions.
Just build wider roads
Can we all agree that some off the prices are to big?
The speed champions are my favorite LEGO sets. I think the 8 stud size is perfect for them. It's the perfect collectible for someone who really likes cars, in my opinion.
I think that speed champions were made to create a series that offered great details and amazing building techniques, but were also not meant for a Lego city, Or any set at all really, I think that these Lego sets lean more on the imaginative side, like making them race at high speed with each other, running in an either total imaginative track, or in custom built tracks, and were also made for display, so yes, they are getting bigger for the cross-sets playing, but are normal size to play with each of them, also a street circuit in your city could be an idea😉
It’s only because LEGO figs are short, the cars are actually a good size ( have you seen real cars compared to people they are pretty big) and road plates need to be updated
Having two seats on the new ones is amazing! It's what got me into Speed Champions. The only thing that bugs me is that hairpieces are very restricted because of the low profile.
In late 2002 When Lego released it's 2nd wave of Lego Harry Potter sets based on "Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets", One set included a car based on the 1960's ford Anglia model. The car in this set was 6 studs wide. What made it so easy to fit 2 figures together was that the car was designed with flat tile pieces where the figures would sit down and a type hook piece would stick between the figure to ensure that they would stay more still. The only times figures would slip out of position would if some were to tip the car over. Other than that, it was probably the perfect size car, even enough to inspire to build a similar car with back seats.
It's 2 am and instead of sleeping, I watch lego cars get bigger
Hey, thank you for the video.
I like the design of these new speed champions cars, but for me, they don't have that magic feeling, that smaller cars have. They are just too big.
I like Lego 2-sit cars because they are quite natural in terms of the real world, but when I build something like this, I try to keep it within 6 pins (7 if count mudguard ledges). And only some models that are supposed to be big are wider. E.g. something like a vintage Cadillac or a large pickup truck.
The vehicles in the City line of sets are still 4/6 studs wide, so LEGO is consistent there. I think the speed champions were never intended to be part of the city but more for a car enthusiast/collectors market. Therefore the LEGO designers did not care about how those sets integrate with the City line. From my point of view even the 6-wide speed champions do not integrate well. They are way too massive and too long in relation to City vehicles. When a Porsche 911 and an ice-cream truck share the same length then there is something wrong :-)
I wouldn’t mind if they added some 60s-80s boats like Cadillacs or Lincoln’s to really poke fun at how large the new cars are
O boy, the late 90's cars. I questioned those as a kid and still do. The six studs wide cars are the best, Speed Champions!
the 4 stud wide and 10 stud long cars from the 70's are even better, simple but rlly cool.
when i was a little kid, i would collect lego cars from the late 1990s /early 2000s because i didn't know any better
i'm pretty sure the new peed champions are as close to minifig scale as possible, bearing in mind that lego ppl are short
Totally agree with you...to be onest if you down scale a real car to minifig scale 1/48 or 1/50 the results are 5 studs for large cars and 7 studs for trucks and buses. I used this size for my city but working with 5 or 7 studs requires advanced techniques and more parts!!! Anyway nice video and nice city!
It would be nice if they made a new car base piece like the classic car body piece they used to have for oldtimers, where a tub shaped piece with two chairs and space for a gear stick. It had fixed doors but two minifigs fit side by side as close as possible
As a kid i was annoyed from the small cars and tryed to build bigger ones by myself. I gave up because my builds didnt have the stability.
As a kid i would had loved this wider cars.
Speed champions are best made for being put on a shelf for display, if you want to fill some empty spaces in a room.
I stopped getting city sets years ago since it is nothing but police and fire stations since I already have one from the 1990's and I am happy with it and I still use them with today's buildings along with all the old cars and trains too.
6 studs + side plates is the perfect size to accomodate 2 minifigs side by side
the shang chi one was way to big lol i was so suprised
The fact that lego increased the stud width for the SC cars has kinda ruined the concept of ”6 wide… ish, real car brands that can fit in your city”
That's why I loved the 6 wide SC models alot more. They were multi-use models. Could have been shelf models one day, or in city scenes the next.
Yeah, I'd say they are probably for display. Personally I prefer the 8 stud wide because they are more detailed and better looking.
Lego: makes cars bigger
Also Lego: makes new road system narrower
The SC cars compared to the classic cars is really like the old classic planes compared to the behemoths of the newer City planes.
Not only are the cars getting bigger, but the roads are getting smaller. At this point, if you want to use the new Lego road system and the new cars, you basically have to use one of those 16x16 plates as a single lane. Then it becomes comfortable for the cars. I've devised a system where you can even build the sidewalk out on top of the road plates by about 4 studs. You end up with 11 stud wide lanes, which are actually pretty decent for most cars. Small 4 stud wide cars might even be able to share the lane side by side, like some wide roads allow cars and motorcycles to do.
I can show you the design if you're interested.
I think all of the new cars should be 8 stud wide because it is the most accurate to scale of lego mini figures
The new road plate systems can handle the 8 stud wide cars just fine.
Yeah it takes a bigger car to fit 2, also I like how Lego made the Bronco 9- studs wide for scale,it was tones of fun,I even got inspired to make my own custom 9-stud wide behemoth.
I agree that six-stud cars are the sweet spot for LEGO City. Any wider, and they'd not only overextend the streets, but also be wider than LEGO trains! However, the new modular (system) baseplates provide the potential to build wider streets, if necessary. However, the eight-stud Speed Champions look great, so they should continue that width for detailed display models.
display of course! i even put the stickers on em....i only put stickers on stuff i dont plan to ever disasssemble. Those are gonna be forever on display. I get extra ones if i wanna disassemble them for their parts or use on my own builds.
Couldn’t agree more. At 6 studs I thought whoa. But the new ones are redonkulous. 6 studs is plenty wide for amazing detail!
Maybe lego cars go back to its roots like 4 studs wide or redesign road plates to 8 studs wide.
The 8+ studs SC lineup is definitely display. Doesn’t fit at all on the road plates. Now, if you build a new city with brick-built roads or the new road plates that came out for 2020, you can make those wide enough to fit 8 stud wide vehicles. Most of your city will be roads, but it is more flexible in that way.
I think the speed champions are perfect and they've finally come to something close to a minifigure scale vehicle, they just haven't had the ability to step other sets up to that same scale for obvious reasons
The original 4-stud cars were also designed around the 1/87 scale of HO trail layouts. The mini-fig scale was a little off, but that was taken as a necessary evil. When the vehicles got pushed to 6-wide, they completely blew the proportionality of the HO scaling, and could not be used on the layouts. Many of us have Lego layouts, but sadly do not have more than one small bedroom for the assembly, so we use the standard 4x8 plywood as a base. With the Lego trains, and 6-wide cars, room is taken up very quickly, and it REALLY pushes the imagination to make the layouts interesting. Now that Lego is pressing their 8-wide builds, it will be really impractical to try to adopt that kind of scale our 4x8 layouts. So, unless we are buying sets like the Speed Champions for purely display models, those of us with small layouts will likely pass, and will build our own MOCs for our cities. Perhaps, it is actually better this way.
It would help if LEGO made their new road to be compatible with these larger vehicles they themselves created.
Love your videos and I completely agree that the cars are too big and look not to scale in lego city’s.
i have the set that the first minifigures came in and its copyright year is 1977 so i must have gotten one of the early early minifigs which is pretty cool, i even opened it out of the box to build it, it was a really cool find
I mean..
These newer speed champions were made for focus on real car detail and not to place in a city, but these could look really cool in a bigger area like a big parking lot car meet or something, or a track or something.
6 Stud was perfekt! THe new series are only for display unfortunately, though I do love the details they have
Yeah, the original speed champions scale was perfect, just enough space to pull of realistic models, while still being in scale with town, city scenes, and mini figures too!
I agree, the new cars aren’t minifig scale. I think 6-wide is optimal because you can still add a lot of detail and realism to them while keeping them approximately to the scale of minifigs
I totally get that the 8 studs speed champions don't fit in your city, you're right. I absolutely love the 8 studs though as they show much more detail and are ideal for display. I always thought that 6 studs wasn't enough and I absolutely hated that only one figure can sit in them.
You should do a classic car show in your Lego city to show off the older model cars
Film: talks about lego cars
meanwhile me: How did he maked that bridge or elevated road into the center of the city ? How cool
I agree 4-6 studs wide kinda go together, but 8 is waaaaay too much.
I think it's a great Idea on what he said on Speed champions 8 stud wide road plates.
That’s almost like comparing a 1926 Ford Model T to a 2021 Ford Raptor
The city cars stay in the same size range as the older cars. Speed Champs are so cool though