LEGO Daihatsu at the 2015 Tokyo Motor Show

The Tokyo Motor Show has been launched this week, one of the major shows for world premiere’s for new cars that will enter the market.

Japan is very unique in that it produces Japanese Domestic Market vehicles that are not exported outside of the country. There is a litany of names such as Skyline, Silvia , Soarer and Bluebird that have historic links within the car ranges whilst there are also the weird and wacky like the Probox, Wingroad and Pronard from the likes of Nissan and Toyota respectively.

Regular readers will know at first I am a diecast collector and Tomytec (Tomica) do a massive range in these JDM models from 1960 to date – the list keeps on growing month by month so as well as LEGO, these are added to my “Garage”. There is a real fight for funds.

Something that did catch my eye reading the reports from this year’s show was this ‘MOC’ specifically built for the show.

The model re-creates the Daihatsu CAST Style a Kei car (a Japanese category of small vehicles, including passenger cars (kei cars or kei-class cars), microvans, and pickup trucks (kei trucks or kei-class trucks). They are designed to comply with Japanese government tax and insurance regulations, and in most rural areas are exempted from the requirement to certify that adequate parking is available for the vehicle) that is a JDM. The car built by LEGO Certified Professional Jumpei Mitsui.

I think it is pretty smart to see LEGO being used within such a high profile event and shows the power of the brand mixing it up with even bigger players within the automotive world. I recently wrote about a MOC created for Porsche for the last Le Mans 24 Hours race, which seems to show that car manufactures are recognising that LEGO can play a very important part in the marketing of products.

I am hoping to get over to Geneva show next year for my annual pilgrimage and day off just looking at all the models on show (oh, and there are a few cars there as well so I hear). So it will be interesting to see if LEGO make an impact there as well. I do hope so.

Picture source: CAR Magazine