I don’t often scour Craigslist or Kijiji for deals, but I should make a point to do so a little more often. Every now and then, a really good deal pops up. This week’s review comes from such a find. I actually got two older sets for a pretty good price. This week, I will review the smaller of the two. It is the ambulance from the 2007 City series. This review will be a slightly different format from my usual reviews. I don’t have any pricing information from back then, and grading it with today’s prices would not really be fair. So, this will be mostly an opinion piece.
Set Summary
Name: Ambulance
Set #: 7890
Theme: City
Cost: $8.50-ish CAD
Brick Count: 118
Minifigures: 1
Release Date: October 24, 2007
Review
I normally start these reviews off talking about the value of a set. This set cost $7.99 in the US back when it was available in stores. The average exchange rate back then was about $0.94 (unlike the crappy $0.79 we experience today). That would have meant that going down to the US and buying this set would have cost me $8.50 CAD. It probably would have cost more to actually buying it in Canada. Saying for a moment that I did mosey on across the border to get this, it would have cost me $0.07 per brick. By today’s standards, that would be excellent. But, again, I don’t know what the average cost was per brick ten years ago.
The design of this set is alright. The build is not as sophisticated as you might expect today, but not bad all the same. The roof is removable in two places so that you can access the interior of the cab, as well as the rear of the ambulance. As with some other LEGO vehicles, this one has no cab doors, which always bothers me. The back of the ambulance does open into the front, so someone could technically walk through from the back. There are two smaller builds as well, one is a stretcher with wheels and a little bottle of fluids. The other could be a crash cart. I do like the design of the little cart, whatever it is. The only thing that I really don’t like about this set is the stickers on the windows. The windows on the sides are actually made up of two, small pieces. The sticker is slapped on to hold them together. While I don’t plan to re-purpose them, it would make it harder to do so without ruining the sticker.
There is only one Minifigure in this set. He is a paramedic wearing shades and a blue baseball cap. He has printing on the front of his torso, but not the back, nor on the legs. His accessory is a grey briefcase, which I guess is meant to be a first aid kit. By today’s standards, I would give this guy 10/15 (67%). The amount of detail given to Minifigures has increased since 2007. The brick-to-Minifigure ratio is actually not bad though, and would earn 90% by today’s standards, but good ratios are often the case with smaller city sets.
This set took me about 16 minutes to build. So, if we go back to the idea that this set would have cost me $8.50, that would put each minute of build time at $0.53. Again, prices are different now, so I can’t really compare that value with my current scale. But, by today’s standards that would be a good build time value. As for how much I like this set, I will keep it as is in my LEGO city. I am sure that in the future there will be an updated model. However, for now, I like this one just fine.
Do you have the old LEGO City Ambulance from 2007? Or, perhaps you have your own story of a cool LEGO find for cheap? Let me know in the comments below.
Until next time,
-Tom
