Doodlebug

When Lionel remade the 11722 girls set back in 1991. It was advertised w/pullmore motor, the set came out it had a can motor. Because Lionel made a mistake, they gave the 19559 MKT stock car to the ones who purchased the girls set, it's considered the add to the set.

While regrettable, when you're dealing with advertising for hundreds of items, legitimate mistakes and errors in descriptions and printing are going to happen and that is not false advertising. After all, it is human beings that are putting the descriptions together and mistakes get made. Clearly, someone should have caught this, but they didn't.

True false advertising implies a specific intent on the part of the manufacturer to deceive customers into buying something based on, in this situation, an intentionally false mis-wording.

Pretty sure the executives at a manufacturer such as Lionel did not purposely set out to deceive their customers into buying this Doodlebug by intentionally mis-representing in its advertising that it was dual-motored.   

FWIW: the Railking version had two motors. I know next to nothing about traction equations, but I agree two motors are better than one.

Looking at the interior of the Lionel Doodlebug, I can't see why they couldn't have gotten two motors in there.

Looks to me that a motor would fit without much trouble, I think they just cheeped out.

Although I can understand and sympathize with Richie C's comments, I do believe that this was a "mistake" which could affect the purchase of such a car and should have been noticed. I clearly am not an expert on these can motors, but I would bet that the can motor in this car is not equivalent, for example, to those stump pulling Pittman motors Williams put in their initial FMs. I believe that Lionel used powerful and excellent can motors in some of their early steam engines. So if the one motor in the present Doodlebugs is of this quality/size , them I would think that one is enough to pull a handful of passenger cars. But if the motor is a less expensive/small/less powerful version ( as Lionel also has used)-then I think their mistake is magnified. Just a thought. Perhaps those of you more knowledgeable about these motors could enlighten the rest of us.  Can the present engine reasonably pull a few passenger cars without strain/ over heating?  Respectfully, P Hering

Truthfully, I doubt that the Doodlebug will pull more than 3-4 18" passenger cars with the single motor.  The motor used appears to be the Mabuchi 385, a common motor for most Lionel diesels.  A single one of those in a fairly light locomotive isn't going to be a pulling champ.

So it seems that all-is-well. Again, not being an expert, I do think that most Doodlebugs in real life had small, gasoline engines and ran as a single unit-or pulled at most  one or two non-powered cars-so the "power" in the new Lionel version(s) is appropriate.

@turtle7 posted:

So it seems that all-is-well. Again, not being an expert, I do think that most Doodlebugs in real life had small, gasoline engines and ran as a single unit-or pulled at most  one or two non-powered cars-so the "power" in the new Lionel version(s) is appropriate.

Well said!