Why no Universal sets nowadays?

[mobi]

Why Lego stopped producing Universal Technic sets?

Those older sets were great for learning fundamentals and spare parts.

[efferman]

maybe because there is lego education available. or they sell not good enough

[Anio]

Universal kits enables to build many models. Generally, these models are very different. In the same box, you can have a plane, a car, or a truck, etc.

Obviously, today TLG prefer to sell 3 different kits than only 1 kit. That's very understandable.

Moreover, the parts (ref number) in a model makes the B-model trickier to design today IMO.

In the past, we had studful technic bricks, axles, gear, plates, and that's all. All the models used more or less the same parts.

Today, there are more details on the sets. There are more parts.

So it's harder to design a B-model whose inventory match nearly perfectly with the A-model. Then, even harder to design a C-model, etc.

[mobi]

The way Lego's recent models are taking shape, it is probably often cheaper to buy missing parts separately and build the model from instruction only.

I think once your Lego collection reaches a threshold point, you can easily make newer models without buying the actual set.

The replicas made by dokludi in YouTube are just amazing.

In my teenage days, I only had few universal sets. But because of their "universal" nature, I had years of fun with them.

But now lack of universal sets means someone can have very limited creativity if s/he buys one one or two sets occasionally.

[DLuders]

Blakbird's Technicopedia has this nice article about all of the Lego Technic Universal Sets. Here are just a few:

[vmln8r]

I think the closest thing we've had in recent years was actually a Creator set, which has gears and whatnot, but also all the Power Functions needed to make an RC vehicle: