Traxxas E-Revo

Over the last year or so I’ve been getting back into radio controlled stuff , and have been building up a collection of helicopters and cars that I never could have managed when I was a kid.

As you might be able to tell from other posts on this blog, I already have an Axial AX10 Scorpion rock crawler, and an Xray T2R Pro 1/10 touring car. But… I wanted another one. Why? Put simply, I want one for bashing. The T2R is only usable on a racetrack, and although the AX10 is great fun on rocks, it’s a bit too slow for any other scenario. For general messing around in the garden or elsewhere, I wanted something with a bit more grunt, so I started looking around.

What to choose?

There were a number of factors I took into consideration when deciding what to buy. Bashing will likely result in damage, so I wanted something with good spares availability and optional parts – so something from a big manufacturer like Traxxas, Losi or HPI was an obvious choice. So was four-wheel drive and decent ground clearance – meaning some sort of monster truck chassis instead of a buggy or truggy. In the end, I narrowed it down to things like the Traxxas E-Maxx, Traxxas E-Revo and HPI E-Savage. The E-Maxx is currently £269 from Modelsport (not including batteries).

HPI E-Savage

However, a bit of research suggested that owners considered the E-Maxx to be weaker and more prone to breakages than the E-Revo, and currently the E-Revo is only £299. So, the E-Maxx is out – no point saving £30 if I’m just going to end up spending it on replacement parts, I figure. The E-Savage is a tempting choice, at the same price as the E-Revo, and this is even including two battery packs and a charger that can charge them both at once. However, more forum surfing suggested that the E-Savage wasn’t quite as good as the E-Revo – here’s an example. So the E-Savage offers better value-for-money with it’s included charger and batteries – it really is a proper “ready to run” package – but again, the E-Revo seems to come out on top in forum discussions for general strength, reliability and, well, fun. Plus, I dunno, I think the E-Revo looks better…

There was one last option I considered – a Traxxas Summit. The Summit is basically a cross between the E-Revo and a rock crawler, with some pretty cool capabilities- it’s got remote locking/unlocking differentials, and a remote selectable high/low ratio gearbox. This means that it’ll run around at speed just fine (not as fast as a proper E-Revo but not exactly slow), but then when you fancy tackling some obstacles, you can lock the diffs, select the low ratio and off you go. A normal monster truck without locked diffs wouldn’t be very good at climbing – the diffs would just send all the power to whichever wheel(s) didn’t have any grip and you’d go nowhere. So, all the fun of a crawler and most of the speed of an E-Revo. Where’s the catch? Well, two things put me off. First, all that remote-locking and remote selecting of ratios. I can’t help but feel it’s going to be a bit fragile in that respect, and I don’t want to be replacing servo linkages and whatnot when a crawling expedition results in a roll down a hillside. Secondly, the price – currently it’s coming in at £449 – that’s 50% more than the E-Revo. Sure, it’s effectively 50% more capable, but still…

So, E-Revo it is, then!

Now it’s arrived, the first thing I’ll be doing is swapping out the receiver for the spare one from my Spektrum DX3S – the Traxxas radio gear is 27MHz, not 2.4GHz, and it’s easier to have the one transmitter and not have to worry about loads of batteries. I’ll be putting up some info on the swap out when I’ve done it.

Some photos of the E-Revo:

…and some video: