[unruhjonny]

I recently decided to pony up, and buy an authentic '70 dealer promo kit from a guy who I have purchased from in the past;
He has a booth at the Portland Swap meet and I knew he had a website, so I reached out to him shortly after this years swap meet was officially called off.
If anyone cares, he recently updated his site, and can be found HERE - he's a super nice guy.

The 1971 kit I previously bought just wasn't cutting it in my books, and I have been thinking of selling some of my larger die cast cars to be replaced with fewer and smaller plastic kits.

In an unusual twist of 'Murphy's Law', no sooner had I received my mint (with original box) 1970 dealer promo kit, that a damaged one showed up on eBay for pennies on the dollar;
I figured I'd put a bid in on it, and let it ride... well I won it too!

My mint one is sitting on a shelf beside the '71, and a red '73:



Well I just received the damaged '70 promo model, and have carefully popped it apart.

Upon inspection, I noticed that there is a detail that I clearly know to be from a pre-production car - and(!!) there are two other details which I also suspect are from the same pre-production car that this model was based off of;

For those of you who don't know, MPC was privy to pre-production cars by the manufacturers, and licensed to create promo kits which dealers had on hand to sell at modest price. MPC (later AMT) would also use these to make and sell retail versions of these kits.

As a point of reference here are some images of the retail version of this kit's box:




The retail versions had more detail, and were sold to be assembled with optional parts while the dealer promo kits were sold assembled in plain white boxes through to 1974(?). After 1974 the promo kits used retail sized boxes with sales literature images, and were to be assembled (in stock configuration only) by the recipient of the kit.
Promo kits were always molded in colour while the retail kits were more often cast in white.

Here is a picture of the dealer promo version of the 1975 kit:



Although this is a 1974 kit, I have the retail version of the 1975 kit and can attest to it being very similar to this 1974 kit:



Anyway;

The detail that popped out to me was the cigarette lighter beside the ashtray (under the radio);
I also noticed that there are three toggle switches on the dash under the A/C vents (the third is where the cigarette lighter ended up on the production car);
I then noticed that there is a horizontal strap for the rear passengers on the inside forward edge of the sail panel!

I thought these details were neat enough to share... even if I wasn't able to take decent pictures of them.

As I see it, since this kit was damaged fixing it up like my car won't hurt any theoretical collectible value - since it was arguably worthless to begin with. Hopefully it will prevent any temptation to buy a kit to build like my own car... even if this one has a fixed closed hood.