Vectormatic

Great review @Jim regarding the "defender wheels on other cars" topic, i understand the wheel is deeper, but by how much? If the wishbone arms could be lengthened by a full stud without seriously impacting the position of the wheel inside the arch, that could indeed make for much better and more realistic steering. I very much like the idea of integrating these wheels into 42096.

It is a sad thing to see happen, personally i value written/pictorial reviews over videos (not just in lego, the same goes for games, computer hardware etc..), and a well-written and researched review is worth a thousand of quick and shallow youtube vids. As others have said, i suspect lego providing the sets later and later is down to fighting leaks (we havent seen anything about the H1 2020 sets yet, which at least to me, feels unusual), this means deadlines get tighter, and at the same time any company is only paying more and more attention to marketing and social media, and in any industry, having the reviews out praising the product at or before launch is key. Sadly this has the effect of putting reviewers on a time-crunch, and pushing out those who cant deliver in minimal time, potentially to the detriment of quality. @Jim Ill join the others here who have expressed a large appreciation for your reviews, i dont tend to buy sets at launch anyway, as i prefer to shop 20% below MSRP these days, so to me, being there at launch isnt a big issue, and as nintendo has said "a late game is only late once, a bad game is bad forever", and as others have said, when researching a set, 9 out of ten times the first hit is a eurobricks review, which often covers all bases.

Amazing work as always @Sariel! Do you plan on making an IS style turret as well? If memory serves, the IS1/2 simply put a new improved turret on the KV1/2 chassis (with some modifications perhaps)

@nicjasno Ill agree with you that the layout of the lego set is wrong, but i also think expecting that level of accuracy is just plain wrong on a lego set. Lego gearboxes are much bigger then their real life counterpart, and yet we expect large amounts of gears and intricate shifting mechanisms. If Lego were to stick to the size of the real thing, we would get a 2-speed gearbox with the shift handle directly on top (courtesy of the blue clutch gear), and MAYBE a center diff, and then you've used up all the space there is. The alternative would be putting a more complex gearbox further forward, and we would end up with no interior, because there is no space for it. The two 1:8 scale cars get closer, the porsche has its gearbox sort of in the right place, but it still is waaaaaaaaaaaay too large to be anywhere near scale, and that is with only 4 speeds. Im not sure on the Chiron's layout, but i would suspect the gearbox to be placed further back in the real thing, as pretty much all mid-engine cars have the gearbox sitting behind the engine, merged with the diff on the rear axle, not below the engine. (putting a gearbox below the W16 would probably put the engine up too high as well)

The porsche didnt include any new gearbox parts right? AFAIK the only new parts in the porsche were the wheel arches and wheels. Same goes for the Defender i think (which i wouldnt class as a UCS car)

Well, i caved and bought the white porsche, enjoyable to build as always. I do have one problem with it though, there seem to be at least two different shades of white in my set, and it is quite distracting, one if decidedly off-white, the other nearly true white white, and given that parts of varying shades are right next to each other, my porsche looks like it was resprayed by a bunch of idiots with different cans of paint from the DIY shop or something.. Not quite the look you want on a prized 70s classic Does anyone else have these issues? Sadly i already put the stickers on, otherwise i could see if i can rebuild it in a less difference prone colour.

Cool test, that bugatti is ripped in half quite easily. Id like to see how the porsche stands up if the test is the other way around, the bugatti is heavier, so would carry more kinetic energy, and the porsche has less mass to absorb it with.

And yet, i know ill buy it, like the sucker i am... (seriously though, if it has the technic features to match the pricetag, ill buy just about any car) That said, im not particularly convinced any of these rumors are worth much, i dont see Lego doing something so incredibly niche as a Lykan or riced-out eclipse, all their recent licensed technic sets have been of big names, and halo-products of those brands to boot, and all currently available. (depending on if you would consider 1M+ hypercars available that is). The red/wing-doors rumor leads to a very obvious Ferrari, but even that im not sure is credible at this stage. We are probably almost a year away from launch of the set anyway, which also means that the car in question might not be publicly known yet. From that point of view, i think concentrating on the H1 sets right now is more usefull, those are less then three months away from store shelves, or even two if they do the usual "launch stuff in december" thing

One wave each year, and the themes switch around a bit, year one had supercars mostly, year two had muscle cars etc... If you can find them, id recommend last years porsche 911 twin-set over this years single 911. Last year's set has a very cool 911 RSR GTE race car, and the '74 turbo looks better in green then in white. Otherwise, just buy the cars you like the look off, its what i do (and then i mostly pick up the rest anyway because i enjoy building them..)

LOL, going from the most hardcore roadcar porsche offers (at the time anyway), to the pinacle of cars that is the Chiron, and now a riced out FWD mistubishi from 25 years ago. I could see them doing a car like that for a succesor to the ZR1, but no way is that thing worth a 4000 part set. On the other hand, lego's infinite looping around shifting gearboxes would finally make sense

@Cumulonimbus The top wishbone dont look attached to anything here, so i assume the body will contain mounts for them. I think id classify it as multilink by the way, the way i see it the bottom "wishbone" is half wishbone and half trailing-arm/wishbone, with the pivoting axle of the black arm not in line with that of the other half, so geometry-wise it will behave slightly different i suspect. The ARB does indeed look active somehow, maybe adjustable stiffness? i would assume that while for high performance on-road you want a stiff ARB, while off-road you want to dail it back or just decouple it alltogether.

Call me crazy, but the picture on the defender configurator for the 3.0 Ingenium looks more like a V6 then an I6 to me, far too wide and short to be an I6, just compare it to the I4s. Off course there is no guarantee the picture on the configurator has anything to do with the actual engine, but this is getting more confusing by the minute. And i'd say that something crucial like a V6 or I6 is settled early on in the process, if indeed @twoofive is right and an I6 wouldnt fit in there, that would have been known for a long time already, and having an I6 in the lego model gets more and more confusing. If it is indeed a V6, this looks like a likely candidate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_AJ-V8_engine#AJ126 as it has already been used in a couple of landrovers since 2014, on the other hand, it isnt an ingenium engine, only does 380ps, and is supercharged, not turbocharged... I think the only reasonable response is to assume JLR will build a high performance Defender eventually, and just slap in a big V8 pre-emptively, just to be sure Either way, thanks again for the pics @twoofive, im happy to know that even if i cant succeed in putting a V8 in there, i can go for a V6 which will look awesome, and i wont be relegated to using an I4

according to wikipedia, the P400 will use a 6-inline engine, all other options are I4s so far. Lego using an I6 mini-fake engine when the real thing was a V6 would be simply unbelievably bad design

Yeah, u can tell from the pics that a V8 would require more work, should definitely be possible though, so ill give it a go once i get the set. Still, that V6 looks really good, its quite a shame land rover doesnt use a V6 in the real thing, because this would have made the original set so much better.

@twoofive awesome v6, looks very appropriately sized in the engine bay, and the intercooler pipes are a nice touch

Any chance of pics of this? Personally im planning on a V8, not sure if the space is there for it though

Derp, it was one week ago before the liebherr launched :P Guess i was out of date

Im not sure you could take 200 pieces off of the Chiron without making it worse. (a full redesign would, but given the chiron as it is, no) Either way, i think we can all agree that recently lego is indeed bumping into the limits of set-size with technic.

@Legobrickbro That explains the ipace, but doesnt explain the 8-wide Formula-E racer, and i dont think the FE cars are wider then F1 for instance, which we've had many 6-wide ones of. @Brick_MOCery People will always complain off course, so that is to be expected. On the other hand, speed champions had a set style, and all cars in the theme adhere to it, so that if you line up a whole bunch of the cars, they all have the same weird out of proportion style, and now lego comes and switches style.. For the i-pace im not to bothered, since that car is a much different beast from all the sportscars we've seen, so just like the F-150 from a few years back it doesnt matter if it stands out. But the FE jaguar... will just look plain odd sitting next to the F1 Speed champions, and if the other sets in the theme are 8-wide as well, we will suddenly have an 8-wide ferrari sitting at the end of a lineup of 6-wide cars... So in that sense, they are kind of ruining the "displayability" of the theme, which for me is a big part of the appeal, being able to take a small selection from my collection along some line (say, only Ferraris, only GT3 cars, or just some colour scheme) and putting those in a display case and have it look cool. Im not sure if i want to continue with the theme if i need to rebuild a seperate 8-wide collection to pick from, especially since ive gotten a bit more critical and dont just buy every set (i skipped the rally fiesta, am skipping the chevy/mini sets, and on the fence about this years porsche), so getting back to the point where i could display a cool set of 8-wides would take 3-4 years at the very least. I know ill probably end up buying a few, even if the whole theme switches to 8-wide, but i very much understand the complaints, as it is something that impacts me as well, despite there being positives, such as better proportions and room for more detail.

42096 isnt an anomaly, the tires are bang on 1:10 there, as is the width. The problem with that set is the nose is too long and the wheel arches/ride height arent properly to scale, which make it look like the tires are too small. Either way, i think tires are a good metric, they are the part which can not be easily adjusted, so those should be the base for any scale measurements. If lego uses a tire which dictates a 1:10 scale, the rest of the model should be scaled to fit, as the other way around is pretty much impossible unless you want custom parts for every single set.

@nerdsforprez Thanks for ruining the back of the car for me, now ill have to rebuild it almost entirely to replace that BLG beam... :P I actually vaguely remember noticing the asymetry whilst building, but i never thought to check the visibility at the end of the build, pretty bad design from lego to have something like this sticking out, looking at it more closely, there are actually some more BLG bits in the back which shouldnt be there, chiefly two axle with pinholes which hold the outermost wings on the bottom There are definitely some details to be fixed here

@grego18f True, the Porsche and Chiron designs (and probably the landrover) are suboptimal, even given the limitations of current parts available. After building the pimped porsche im very much impressed with the operation, but that is more to do with the shifting mechanisms then the actual power transmission gears. In the same vein i find the shifting mechanism on the Chiron rather meh, the paddles are extremely lacklustre and un-ergonomic. It would be nice for Lego to spend more effort in designing optimal gearboxes, but given the target market with the large sets (in which i assume serious gearhead AFOLs are a minority), i guess the suboptimal gearboxes are profit-optimal for lego. I'll have to give the 720s gearbox a look, and perhaps checkout the fixes available for the Chiron.

Slack is pretty much a given with lego, the only way to minimize it is to minimize the amount of gear meshes, with the current set of parts, you cant simply make a gearbox as low-mesh as in real life, especially with 8 different ratios, and stuff like the DNR switch doesnt exactly help either. if you dont want slack, you keep it simple, look at 42048, only two gears, and from memory, max 3 meshes from crank to axle. With the new blue clutch one could make a two speed with only two meshes, crank drives one axle, gearbox contains two sets, one of which is selected, output shaft drives the diff. (im actually considering a setup like that for modding 42096) Obviously the driving rings/clutches still introduce slack, but eliminating that slack would require something like a synchromesh ring unless you want to end up grinding clutch gears, and a synchromesh ring would end up receiving some wear, especially when shifting under load. Im sure there are better designs then what lego has produced with the porsche and chiron, just look at how well the "pimp my porsche" setup works, it really is a thing of beauty, but at the end of the day you still end up limited by the fact you are working with plastic in a rather integer-dimensioned setup, and parts need to be more then single use to make sense to produce, so a 23-9 gear pair might be just what we need for more accurate and better gearboxes, but it doesnt make sense for lego to make it, maybe its a niche 3d-printing can fill?

Sets like the defender take a lot of time to work out, no way that they pushed it out as filler, especially with new pieces. If you want to know what a last moment filler set looks like, check out this years white 911 turbo in the speed champions lineup, its a straight up colour swap from a car from last year. red + wingdoors = ferrari to me, probably the LaFerrari, FXX-K or the succesor to LaFerrari (dont know if that is due next year already), Them doing any other car brand in red would be sacrilege imho

Wider is actually more accurate, take the senna, it is 19x6 studs, the real car is 190 inches by 80 inches, meaning at 8-wide, it would be perfectly proportioned. The height (50 inches in real life), is also bang on at 5 studs. 8 wide is entirely out of style for speed champions though, the narrow width which produces a slightly too long and high look is what makes the series look the way they all do, for five years now.