When Town was evolving into City.

Lowrider Longboi

@MCLegoboy said:
"Lowrider Longboi"

Da-da-da da-da da, da da-da da da...

Hey, waitaminnit. That doesn't look anything like (*picks name at random from phone book*) Frank Drebin.

The whole 2003-2004 "World City" aesthetic was so bizarre. The only good thing to come from that era was 10027 Train Shed.

Oddly shaped

This was such an amazing set when I was a kid. Compared to the Town Jr police cars that introduced me to Lego, this was the spitting image of a Ford Crown Victoria police interceptor like the ones on the streets of my home town. It looks primitive today, which is why I need the Spiderverse set for its modern version of a police car that looks more or less like a Crown Vic.

I wrote this review of the set in 2018:

The World City Squad Car is a good example of set design during Lego's brush with bankruptcy in the early 2000s. Thanks to a plethora of new parts, sets from the time looked radically fresh and new compared to those of the previous decade, but the set designers were still learning to use new parts like wedge plates and curved slopes, so the results sometimes looked clunky and unrefined. World City itself is perhaps the clearest expression of the era, as it is the bridge between Town and City: short-lived and clearly with a foot in both eras, such that Brickset could easily classify it as a subtheme of either larger theme but instead classifies it separately.

The Town cars of the late 1990s, known pejoratively as the "Town Junior" era, were extremely simple. The sides were built up with bricks and doors; the hoods were simple slope bricks; the headlights were either 1x1 plates underneath the slope bricks or just printed slopes; small cars never had a roof or rear windshield; as often as not the tires were large balloons that didn't fit the chassis; and the cars were almost always built on an extremely limited vehicle base that allowed for no flexibility in the placement of the driver's seat or the wheels. Even as a kid, I thought them boring and ugly, because they didn't look like real cars.

Then along came World City, and suddenly we had a little police car that looked almost like a Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor. The new curved plates used for the hood and trunk closely resembled the smooth curves of the second-generation police interceptor that appeared in superhero movies like Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, and on the streets in my home town. Turned on their sides, the Jack Stone siren pieces became gloriously big headlights and taillights that matched the curves of the hood, again like a Crown Victoria Police Interceptor. The clever use of four white headlight brackets allowed a radiator grille in front! And bumpers! None of these features appeared in any of the Town Junior cars I was familiar with. The new trans-black windscreen matched the color of the glass I saw on cop cars around town. The wheels almost fit in the wheel arches, though they were a bit too broad. Finally, the police officer looked like a friendly guy this time, not like a grim bully hiding under sunglasses who would as soon send you to jail as cite you for speeding and would definitely not help get your cat out of a tree. It's worthwhile to note, too, that the vehicle base used for this Squad Car had been introduced a few years before for Town Formula One cars, but had never previously been used in a regular car for wide release. Since 2003, it's been used as the base for an astonishingly wide variety of cars in different lines and scales.

This kit does have some flaws. The wedge plates used on either side of the driver's seat don't make much sense, the siren mount comes off too easily, the stickers are fragile and easily damaged, the wheels have extremely low clearance, and one wishes for a rear windscreen and a roof. The police car, taxi, and civilian car in the 2003 Spider-Man line didn't have these problems: they had rear windshields, roofs, and slightly more complex builds. But they weren't in $4 lunch-money sets, and this was. Later four-wide cars in the City line have much more substantial builds and more realistic detailing, but they also rely on specialized wheel arches and SNOT parts to support the front and rear fascias. For my money, the 2003 World City Squad Car and Spider-Man cars are the best brick-built 4-wide cars ever released, thanks to their realism and innovative use of new parts without relying on specialized molds to substantially define the shape of the car.

fits an entire squad of 1

I'm hearing a lot of discussion about that modern-day LEGO City is kind of a police state, based on the overabundance of those type of sets. Not sure if I agree with that, but World City pushed a bit closer to that idea It's not so clear on this set in particular, other than the somewhat dystopian, authoritarian choice of colours but the HQ in 7035 includes a bigger clue.

A strange time for Town/City indeed.

Huh, using his phone while driving. Typical of the "do as I say not as I do" attitude of the World City police department.

I love the World City aesthetic, and I think one of the major culprits is the graphic design for the packaging. That city-at-dawn skyline was really appealing and thematically it aligns as well with the dawn of the evolution into 2000s Lego, the curved plates, the extreme prints, the dotted eyes, and as Lego themselves was learning how to effectively use these parts and find its footing into a more intricate building style, it was perfect to grow up alongside. I didn't own many of these, but they paired very nicely with the urban fascination stylings of contemporary Racers, Island Xtreme Stunts, Sports, Spider-Man, Studios - sets from adjacent themes could mix together and still feel cohesive.