Thoughts on 6530: Sport Coupe

One of 1990's finest.

    This is set 6530: Sport Coupe, and I'd like to talk about it. 

    This is not a professional review, I am not a professional person, I am an amateur with a camera I don't entirely know how to use, so some photos will be illustrative of points, but out of proper focus.    

    Set 6530: Sport Coupe (also known as City Car) is a set from 1990 in the Town theme that would later become the World City theme in 2003 and just City in 2005, which it has been for nineteen years now. 

    The set features this very modren bright yellow car with transparent light blue opening canopy and back windscreen, along with one presumably female driver with stripey shirt and black suitcase. This being 1990, the array of faces hadn't quite expanded so much, despite the Pirates theme putting in work, Town and Space sets would largely stick to the standard smile until a few years into the decade. This lovely white pants wearer is no exception, femininity granted only by her neck-length hair, a piece that had been introduced seven years prior and continued to see regular use until 2018 and by that time it'd been superseded by dozens of other, more detailed hairpieces in an enormous array of colors.

     But onto that opening canopy... 

Just pops right open, see?

    The biggest piece in the set is element #4474, six studs long, four studs wide and two studs tall, it fits in with the old style of "finger hinges" that persisted all the way until the 2000s when they were largely replaced with ratcheting hinges and joints. Most of the bulk comes from this one piece and gives it the angular shape that continues on with the specialized hood and fender piece, #2513, a piece that matches #3788 (a personal favorite piece of mine for some reason) at the back. While #2513 fell out of use around the turn of the century, a modified and updated #3788 still sees use today, that being #60212 which features a hole in the middle. Vera exciting developments.

Very spacious interior for a single-seater.

 

     

    So there she is, comfortably seated with her suitcase tucked away behind the seat, hands on (as on as they can get) the wheel, eyes forward, shoulders back, and ready to ride. Note the use of a grey 1x2 plate between the headlights for a grille, which could always be false. This could actually be an electric car, much like the similarly wedge-y 1974 CitiCar. The two vehicles have a lot in common, even with the exaggerated windscreen on the Sport Coupe, the inspiration for the extremely generic alternate set name, City Car, might have been the CitiCar, just different enough not to cause any legal trouble. 

    But really look at this thing.

Stay fresh, cheese wedge.

    I'm not really being serious about any connections, I'd have to track down whoever designed the set and ask them direct, "Say did you base your LEGO set on this weird old electric car manufactured for three years?" 

    They'd probably say no. I just wanted to talk about the CitiCar, because look at it.  

     

    Anyway. 

      

There she goes...

    But the Sport Coupe doesn't just have headlights, it's got taillights, too. Fancy taillights, too, being 1x1 transparent red tiles instead of 1x1 transparent red plates like some of its contemporaries. The headlight bricks and 1x2 brick in the back fill out the rest of the build, and the very commonly used, even today, windscreen piece, #3823, is used as a back window instead. Despite being the same height as the canopy piece it's set one plate lower because of the hinge, it messes with the flow of the bodywork some and a modren set would definitely try to mitigate it, but for a cheap set with not even fifty pieces from the 90s, you could hardly do better at the scale. 

    I do want to talk about scale.

    Sport Coupe is a classic LEGO car, not as classic as some, but from 1978 to the mid-2000s, minifigure-scale cars were just this big, outside of some large service vehicles. Four studs wide was the standard for a very, very long time, and it has yet to completely vanish as even new polybag sets have a tendency to come out that size, like 30568: Skater,  released in 2021.    

    The real trick of the whole thing is that minifigures aren't people-sized, they're too wide, their heads are too big, their limbs are too short, the chunky proportions demand lots of room to sit comfortably in vehicles, so while the Sport Coupe's real-ish world equivalent would likely seat two only one plastic butt can occupy the single seat in the set. But then calling it a seat is pretty generous.

    The entire vehicle is built on one of the pieces of the era, #4212b, pictured here, this large four studs by ten studs piece featured insets for the wheels and a single "seat" in the very middle of the piece, set a plate and a half lower than the surrounding framework with slight inclines in front of and behind it so minifigures could recline. 

Just a little. 

Of course this did require 1x4 plates to cover up the tiny gap on either side, but that's just good styling even if it tends to extend below the front or back of the vehicle, like it does on Sport Coupe.

Now if four studs wide was the standard, what's the standard now?
 

Can't be that much bigger, right? Two studs can't be that much wider.

    Turns out it is, though the comparison is coming down to "set I had on hand" rather than "set that is more directly comparable."

Yellow, but not quite as yellow.

     Say hello to set 40650: Land Rover Classic Defender from 2023, made to kind of coincide with the release of set 10317: Land Rover Classic Defender 90, one of LEGO's "scale model" type vehicle sets, among sets like 10256: Ford Mustang, 10271: Fiat 500 and 10321: Corvette. It was a limited-release LEGO store and online exclusive, but despite its monstrous size compared to little ol' Sport Coupe, it still only seats... one figure.

A little more comfortably, with lots of elbow room, but there's only room for one in the thing, unless you were to sit someone in the back, but then how did they get in? How do they get out? Like a lot of contemporary car designs the set features no doors, no hinged elements, just a roof that pops off in a pretty inorganic way, leaving you to imagine doors.

    

    Imagining doors? What a world to live in.

Turn signals, would you believe it?

    It's still a pretty cute set, with the spare tire on the back and the roof rack and all that. It having no back window is extremely strange, and the yellow 1x1 tile next to the left hand taillights is an odd choice for a not-quite-there license plate, but the shaping is good, the wheels are all big and chunky, it does a good job representing its namesake and the printed 2x2 jumper plates (piece #87580pr0004) work together great with the stickered grille, the only sticker in the set.

    And unlike Sport Coupe, it's all on a big brick-built chassis, a lot of plates all fit together for extreme stability, this bad boy could bonk down the stairs and it might only lose its side mirrors.

    Needless to say it dwarfs the older set, but despite everything it barely features more space than a set 33 years its senior. It certainly relies on less big, specific pieces, but despite kind of seating two it hasn't got much on the little yellow wedge. This isn't at all a case of stagnation or anything, it's more a sign that what worked that long ago continues to work now. Car sets are car sets, they were like this in 1978 (kind of, sets like 600: Police Car didn't even have an interior for the figure), they're like this now, the differences are all in design and pieces used, not function. 

I think there's something beautiful about that, but I'm not sure what it is.

    But size and piece count differences aside, the leap from four to six studs wide hasn't really brought about all that much change, just bulk and space, not bad things in a toy. 

    They do get bulkier, though.

    Like a lot.

 

 

 

The leviathan breaches!

  Behold the eight stud wide monstrosity, set 76908: Lamborghini Countach of the Speed Champions range, based specifically on real-world vehicles. The sets in the range were initially six studs wide like most cars at the time, but they expanded to eight to pack in more accurate detail, but this does mean they're borderline too big to be properly minfigure-scaled vehicles. 

Doesn't stop them from being pretty neat. I mean this one, it's a Countach, one of the coolest looking cars ever made, if you ask any seven year old even today they'll probly tell you so. I had a white Hot Wheels one, it was a precious item of mine for years even if it was too wide to go around the one track set I had as a kid, it was still cool as hell. 

The LEGO-quivalent is just as cool, featuring accurate styling even at the limited size, the printed wheel hubs and canopy are particularly nice even if the white printing is pretty poor on the latter. The whole thing is just a big batch of slopes, from the angled hood to the rounded-ish back end, to the "cheese slopes" on the sides to get that upward contour just right. 

But like all, and I mean all, Speed Champions sets, it's got no doors.

Eighteen and a half studs long, this bad boy.

    It's just all brick-built shaping and lots of studs-on-side construction for the side panels where doors ought to be, there's no hood, no trunk, the canopy just pops off like the roof on the Land Rover does. The play features simply do not exist, outside of the obvious "make cars do a race" play feature that can be accomplished with anything that has wheels.

The backside on this thing is perfect, by the way.

But you're not getting them for that, you're getting them for the car that they mostly look like and are branded as, these are fun building experiences with some genuinely clever techniques to nail the styling and then they're roll across the table a few times and put on the shelf type sets. I had to get this one because it's, y'know, a Countach, and as of now it's one of only two Speed Champions sets I still own, the other being the so-bizarre-I-had-to-get-it 76906: 1970 Ferrari 512 M, the range otherwise has very limited appeal to me, with its not-quite-minifigure-scale size and all. 

But if they do a Lancia Stratos I'm buying it ASAP.

       But even with all that bulk, all those bricks, all that styling and shaping and tiny little specific piece use, the Sport Coupe is still nearly a brick taller, if you don't count the rear wing, that canopy piece really does put in work on the little yellow coupe.

 

 

    And even thirty years on we're still getting minifigures sat down in their cars effectively the exact same way, whether it's on a hinge or just comes off, the roof has got to go to get those little peoples seated inside. More things change, the more they're really really different except for a couple similarities.

    Now the Lambo does feature a slightly more detailed interior than either of the other cars I've featured, with its red leather-ish dash and steering column, and the use of a grey microphone as a gear shift, the car actually very comfortably seats two in the provided space, all thanks to part #65364 that makes up most of the chassis. Just like part #4212b long, long before it, the piece is designed entirely to accommodate riders, in this case it does so by offsetting the middle by a half-stud on either side so that the middle is a four by five grid of studs. This offset means that two figures can sit by side with just a little elbow-bumping.

Room for none more.

     

    This kind of offset can actually be achieved in six-stud-wide vehicles reasonably enough, but it's far, far rarer than in the Speed Champions line, which after its width increase has rarely ever had cars that couldn't easily seat two (like the aforementioned Ferrari). Strangely most sets in the range only feature one figure, even rally cars, which need a driver and a navigator for competition, only come with one figure and a requisite wrench.

    But that's 6530: Sport Coupe. A set from 1990, consisting of forty-three pieces with a single minifigure and accessory. It's three years older than I am and I bought it for less than ten bucks, and I love it. Not like a big love, it's not on my list of top sets of all time or anything, I don't have a major connection to it outside of the general affection I feel for many old, old LEGO sets, but I love it and I'm glad to have it.