RC Rally Car Shootout – Parts Availability
RC Rally Car Shootout – Parts Availability
Every car breaks eventually. Your shiny new car is going to blow something up, have a bad landing, or maybe even find itself driving full speed into a brick wall. When the time comes, which cars will be easy to get parts for and which ones are going to be trouble? As you may have seen in some of our reviews, not being able to get your hands on parts can be quite frustrating. How did the cars in our shootout stack up for parts availability?
Results-
| Points | Vehicle |
|---|---|
| 1 | Traxxas Rally |
| 2 | Thunder Tiger Mini Countryman |
| 3 | HPI Ken Block WR8 |
| 4 | Kyosho Demon |
Notes-
Traxxas – Hands down winner here, Traxxas parts are already on the shelves of most hobby shops in the country. Also very important, parts that aren’t already on shelves are typically easily found on-line. Traxxas parts are sold to hobby shops by multiple distribution companies, even if one distributor is out of a certain part it might be available to your LHS from another source.
Thunder Tiger – Great Planes is the distributor for Thunder Tiger parts here in America and a large percentage of hobby shops buy from them, thus making most parts easy to get. Additionally, the Mini Countryman is based off a popular Thunder Tiger platform, one of our local hobby shops had parts on the shelf (albeit a limited amount) for the car.
HPI – HPI is another brand distributed by Great Planes and after looking up some part numbers most were easily available on-line.
Kyosho – None of our local hobby shops had any replacement parts for the Kyosho. Some quick research revealed very few sources to get parts for the Demon.
What’s up next? Quite possibly the most important category of them all, Price.
