Fanfare for the common car
Stephen Paul Hardy gets back to basics.
It strikes me that there is a perceptible tendency in the 1/18 automotive scale model world to focus on what were traditionally referred to as the ‘flagship’ models of an automobile manufacturer’s range. In terms of production history, those flagship models are themselves an interesting study. They were more than badge-engineering that, at the height of the BMC/British Leyland days, saw identical bodies detailed out with a range of badges (and appropriate trim to match) to attract different sectors of the buying public. They were top-end, more expensive, well equipped, high-powered versions. Products of the post-war affluence, when success was increasingly measured by consumer products, and when the model of the car denoted whether it was probably a company fleet car or coveted private purchase. A trend that seemed to escalate from the seventies onwards with more and more ostentatious automotive versions of the ‘power dressing’ theme.
Maybe you once owned the full sized 1300L family version in beige, but always aspired to the 2.0
GLX sports trim version in yellow that you could never afford. Perhaps then you would happily buy a model of that version, because that’s the closest you will now ever get to having one. But maybe if the only scale model version you can buy is the “3.0 Costworthit Turbo with wings-n-bling pack” in vile violet, and you still had lingering affection for the old beige hack, wouldn’t you perhaps wish you could buy a good quality, authentically detailed, model of your old car as it was when it was new in the showroom?
In the same way that I am a keen advocate and fan of scale model manufacturers that make both open and closed version of convertibles, I can’t help wondering if a trick is being missed here. Surely the base model development is very much identical for a model of a standard version as it is for a flagship or tuned version - the differences tend to be in the finishing and the added detailing. So would not covering both ends make commercial sense?
I, for one, often wish it was a high-end quality model of the common version car that I could buy - how about you?