Where'd All The Manufacturers Go?

[Saito]

This reply is a bit off topic but, here I go anyway. It was stated earlier that RC isn't all that important to Tamiya. True enough. They could drop RC all together and probably go on making the most realistic plastic models available and be quite happy doing it. When you read the Tamiya autobiography, RC is little more than a footnote. The mini 4wd section is much bigger. Its clear the Tamiya's true passion in life is creating ultimate realism in small scale. The efforts they went to in researching full size vehicles is astounding. It makes Monogram, MPC and Revell (from back in the day) look like kiddie rubbish in comparision. If it were profitable (and even if it isn't sometimes) I think Tamiya would love to give us extremely realistic RC models like the Bruiser. I think its the tanks, semis and High-Lifts that they may truly love.

Still aside from all the realism, someone at Tamiya loves RC cars in general. Evocative designs like the Avante don't come about from a company that just does RC as an aside buisness or one that only cares about realism. There was effort and soul put into that car. They wanted that car to really go places in a sense. Yes, Tamiya can crank out Hot Shot clones (and now it seems to be Dark Impact clones) or Wild Dagger clones for profit, getting the most for their R&D buck. They can make realistic offerings too. Its just that there have been times when profitability or realism (they're economic as well as true heart's desires) have been cast aside to create something for the love of making a better RC vehicle.

[Shodog]

Reading over the replies there are some great opinions. My take is that simply times have changed

As long as there are cars that are substandard, there with be manufactures to fill the upgrade need. The companies are still out their, their just making a products for a different vehicle.

The reason there were so many boutique companies was because the cars sucked that bad. I would consider the T-maxx a milestone vehicle in the R/C industry. It was tough and durable but it still had quite a few shortcomings. Aftermarket manufacturers rose to the rescue. Coupled with excess manufacturing capability from the slowing in the defense and aerospace industries had companies willing to make CNC parts for a niche market.

I know a lot of you guys slag RTR vehicles but really I think they are the best thing to happen to the industry. The bottom line is that they sell. Not everyone is born with a gold plated Tamiya wrench in their mouth with the capability to build some of these vehicles. Getting people past that hurdle and into a hobby quality car instead of a toy store throwaway should be the first priority to keep this hobby alive.

[TechWun]

My comments are regarding the hobby in general. I got into r/c through racing 1/12th in 1979 and have been heavily involved with all aspects of it ever since, including being a sponsored racer. I got out of serious racing around 1990 when racing started becoming expensive and it became more about your budget than your engineering skills and since 1992 I have run a small r/c club. Since 1984 I have been heavily involved with several hobby shops and sales reps so have a good understanding of the hobby in general from the 80s through to the present day and always do whatever I can to promote r/c cars. This is why I pointed out that nitro monster trucks and micros are the biggest areas right now, which have nothing to do with racing.

My reply concentrated on the racing side as the initial question asked about manufacturers that are heavily involved in racing that seem to have disappeared but had just moved into different areas.

No, my opinion is based on experience of what sells in hobby shops, not what is raced at the track. Yes, electric buggies have always been bought but ever since the T-Maxx and Savage came out electric off road and even touring cars have become a niche market even though they are the biggest areas of racing. The trend for the past few years has been towards big nitro monster trucks. I remember talking with one of the UKs top racers who started as a sales rep for Schumacher and was shocked to discover that they only sold 1 electric touring car for every 50 Riots.

Yes, LiPo and to a greater extent brushless have helped introduce electrics to a wider audience helped by the no maintenance advantages. Certainly now they are selling RTRs with brushless setups makes them even easier to go fast which is what sells these days. Hopefully it will get more newcomers to start with electric instead of diving in with a nitro truck that gets put away the first time they can't get it started. Some US tracks are running 20 minute 1/10th stadium truck mains which is proving popular, so much better than working all day for a 5 minute race. The converted rallycross buggies look awesome and as I'm an electric man (got sick of the mess that's a nitro truck) they sure do interest me. Unfortunately it will be a while before the price drops to a reasonable level.

I can see your point. A lot of this is down to Tamiyaclub, many of the groups got together through this site as most of us don't have others to bash with and because of the movies section we tend to film it and put videos up. We have the advantage there are a lot of TC members here on a small island so it is easy to organise get togethers when you only have to drive for an hour or two. A lot of the bashes used to be huge, but even those are dying off unfortunately. I have never seen a large bashing group that didn't involve Tamiyaclub members, a shame really.

Electric off road for the racers in the UK seems huge right now, but that's because we have a fraction of the off road tracks the UK used to so the tracks seem busier. If you want to see what the UK manufacturers check out the Atomic Carbon Slim4

Definitely not, I'm just showing the background to the statement on the website having known the history behind it. That web page has been there for at least 3 years now yet they are still just selling old stock on ebay so highly unlikely we will ever see him making new products, after all look at all the other products he is now selling on the site. As Alex said (thanks mate! ) 'looking to educate' is probably about right.

Your reply was well thought out and appreciated. I respect your input and your stance on educating as well. You had me on a bit of a defensive at first, but it's definately been cleared up. Thank you.

FWIW if your interested, I fancy these guys as my favorite bash videos. http://www.youtube.com/user/ady4488 The rivy bash's are great. They had a massive jump setup and a 5b lost a wheel.. hahah great stuff!

- Matt

[bgruen]

In a nutshell, competitive 2WD 1/10 scale RC cars have evolved into their final form. It was first established with the RC-10 and has evolved to the point where the latest version vehicles are almost indistinguishable from the last version. I personally miss the days of flat graphite chassis plates and backyard engineering. It was always so cool to transform your RC10 into a sprint car or late model oval racer by using your own ideas and imagination, and someone else was always doing something new that you hadn't thought of. The car manufacturers who evolved the design survived (Associated, Losi, Traxxas, Hyperdrive), the Big Japanese companies survived (Tamiya, Kyosho), and other lesser companies folded up. As far as the aftermarket parts companies, the designs became so integrated that there was not a whole lot of room for improvement. Most of what you see is the stock design done in a different matearial (aluminum parts or different formula plastics).

I think the biggest problem with the hobby is that it was never advertised beyond the RC magazines. The Tamiya commercials ran a few times when I was a kid, but that was about it. At its peak, Associated could have afforded a nationwide advertising campaign here in the States, but they never did. If you are ever in a Hobby Shop when a true newbie walks in you'll notice they are overwhelmed by stuff they never even new existed. XBox, PS, and the rest of the computer / video game systems have multi-million dollar advertising campaigns, RC stuff is never advertised beyond RC themed mags.

As far as Kyosho in the US, they were not happy to no longer be the top dog at Great Planes, so they started planning to self distribute. GP got wind of this and dropped the product and pushed rumors of Kyosho going out of business. And Gil Losi had gotten fed up with the bureaucracy in the company he had started; now he's at Kyosho.

I think the next trend you will see will be 1/10 scale 4WD become more prominent OR 1/8th scale 4WD electric will catch on. The new combination of LiPo batteries and brushless motors is too powerful for 2WD platforms, and I see 4WD as the solution. I have an 11V Mamba system in a XXX4, and it's just about the fastest thing at the track, at any scale, but the size of the chassis limits what you can actually do with it. www.4wdrc.com

The Bolink name, the Legends and the leftover body patterns were sold off separately to a small family business who wanted to keep the Legends alive. A great idea for cost controlled racing the problem for the class (and the Street Spec series before it) is stopping the win at all costs mentality in something that should be cost controlled. Hopefully they will see a comeback, in the UK Mardave has taken off again thanks to a new owner and the spiralling costs of touring cars making racers look for a cheaper alternative.

The Legends design was sold to Xtreme RC Racing in York SC. http://www.xtremercracing.com/INFORMATION.cfm Bruce made them in small quantities but it really didn't catch on. It's just too easy to get a touring car or pan car from ebay and the local track is so bumpy that suspension travel is really required. He may have sold the enterprise back to the original owner, or he may be still building them for the old owner as you can now get them from www.bolink.com. Either way its just too easy / cheap to get a better car used from ebay.

Bob

[scollins]

Hi all,

Dont get much time to be active on the TC forums, but I would like to share my thoughts on this thread, and would like to go back to something TC member TamiyaMan said early on that I agree with some points on.....

"The whole RTR craze has also done considerable damage to the hobby. I'm no fan of it at all - even deplore it, however I'm not even convinced our hobby and the progress of the hobby is to blame here. I see it as a broader change for the worse in simply how people are choosing to live their lives. Kids today are more interested in video games and cell phones and what they can do with their computer and TV's - it's a generation of instant gratification that fits more with the RTR crowd where they don't care how it works they just want to run it and when it breaks have someone else fix it. I live in a block where even the toddlers have battery operated ride on toys as they can't be bothered to even pedal! The days of the great Tamiya kits and numerous aftermarket company support fit better with the world when we actually made our meals from scratch and cooked them in an oven, went out to the theater instead of TVOing primetime shows, and read newspapers instead of logging on to cnn.com. The masses that insist on driving 90MPH thru rush hour traffic to be at work 5 minutes earlier are not the kind of people that will take the time to enjoy the art of kit building."

At the age of 35, I have been goofin with RC cars for 23years or so here in the USA. Seeing the serious RTR thing really take off with Traxxas (originally) has been good for the hobby but has taken a few things away from it too. I am mixed on it, but overall feel the RC hobby has been "cheapened" by it for the die hard enthusiasts and "rejuvinated" to others that feared RC would be lost forever among PC's, PDAs, Xboxes, TvO, MySpace, laptops, bluetooths, MP3s, ipods, cellphones and texting, yada yada yada....

I think its not been so much 'damage to the hobby' that RTR's have brought... just a realization that more people (parents and kids alike) are looking to get into it quickly and "go fast" with the least amount of effort and time. This just points to our self-made overly busy culture.

"Taking the time to enjoy the art of kit building" is something that thrives just fine on TamiyaClub and sites like RC10talk, as two examples. I think there was more room to take time with kit building. Play time was simpler. When I was 12 years old and was into RC cars, modeling as a hobby was a bigger chunk of the pie among other things male youngsters like myself were into such as BMX racing and freestyle stuff, skateboards, Car-Toons magazines, Dukes of Hazzard (ahh Daisy), and the Van Halen video, "Hot for Teacher". Remember when MTV played music videos? (Thats a snapshot of my 1980's BTW).

Working with your hands to create things is something that was a core skillset of youngsters in the past because a lot of the toys were designed for tactile interaction - Think about it, The slinky, legos and the "mechanix series", Erector sets, Stompers, Hot Wheels cars, plastic model cars from Monogram, MPC, Revell, AMT, Tamiya, etc... All of this stuff required 3-D skills between the kid and the hobby or toy of choice. Or at least an intrest in bringing something to life with time and patience applied to it. There are many fellas today (with kids) who cant change a tire on the car they drive to work. Ummm, yea............ they may not be the kit builders or teaching their kids about the nuts and bolts of how things work. I was lucky, my Dad spent time with my brother and I on this stuff. We need to remember that not all youngsters get the opportunity, but are left with the XBOX to entertain them, not a model plane with 250 pieces and 3 missing in the carpet of the living room.

With all of the digital toys available now, should we be so surprised that sales are thu the roof on RTR RC's?

2 cents for the tray,

scollins

[RcChopShop.com]

Not quite. CRP went under and someone bought up all the left over stock and set up http://www.rcchopshop.com One of his friends bought a load of it from him and set up teamcrp.com. No connection with the original company at all.

Thanks for the clarification terry.sc. I see you read the article on our CRP adventures!

[Wireless]

Before I get started, may I throw Yankee and PB into the equation...?

In my humble opinion, the popularity of R/C did indeed spike in the mid to late 80's as the performance of off-road cars vs. the price of being able to buy and operate one correllated nicely. This was then matched perfectly with another correlation, namely that of the very popular scale and static modelling stores offering R/C models. The effect was that all of a sudden, scale and static modellers had immediate access to competitively priced, high performance r/c vehicles through the hundreds and hundreds of such model stores that existed all over the UK. They became popular as gifts for children and such as it was now realistic for a kid to build and maintain an R/C car such was the ease of build and robustness. Let's not forget the concerted effort in marketing made by the R/C companies. Who will ever forget the wonderful Tamiya and Kyosho catalogues of the 1980's...? For a 10 year old back then, these were the books of dreams...!

The next stage as has been described before is very much a case of video killed the radio star, or in our case, video games killed the radio controlled star. High powered multi player video games consoles took the wind from the sails of r/c cars. Why bother standing outside in the cold with a beaten up looking r/c buggy when you could sit in your bedroom with your mates and play with a real looking racing car on your screen...? Best bit is you don't have to repair it when you crash and if you fancy a change, spend 15 on a new game and you can go and shoot baddies instead. During this stage, it was seemingly only the club and racing scene that saw any real r/c action with both evolving into on-road touring cars for the majority of racing...

And now to today where the kids are still buying video games. So what of r/c...? Well, the ones buying this stuff are all older and wiser and it comes as no surprise that we are all pretty much 1980's throwbacks re-entering the r/c scene to continue where we left off in 1989...! The difference is, we are more social animals. It's no longer enough to run a buggy in your back yard on your own. This was great as a kid, but it gets a bit dull these days. What we need is a method to organise meetings where we can socialise around an r/c theme. For this reason, the racing clubs still operate successfully, although nowadays, it's mainly touring cars and of course, this is where Tamiyaclub comes along and why it is so successful as it ties in the social requirements of r/c fans of a certain age (ahem) and the modelling / bashing / racing aspect too.

Regards RTR killing the hobby, I am not so sure. I would even go so far as to say that RTR has kep the hobby alive by bringing in new customers who don't have the time or skill to build their own car...

[Tamiya1/10]

For any company to survive it must have the followings:

1) the right financing

2) the right product

3) the right price

4) the right channel of distribution

5) the right marketing

6) the right mfging process

Short comings to any of the above will put the company under.

In the end is the right people making the right decisions.

Just my two cents worth.

Cheers,

[RcChopShop.com]

And the right Ethics! Some people skipped town with the moola and caused the demise of many a company!

[Tamiya1/10]

And the right Ethics! Some people skipped town with the moola and caused the demise of many a company!

In this case have the wrong people in place making wrong decision for the company. Maybe is the right decision for that individual until he realizes he my have to go to jail with big, hairy, sweaty cell mates.

The company failed to put in preventive and detective controls to prevent people from making unauthorized decisions, unless the owner is involve.