Losi Mini Desert Truck 1/18

[The Brand]

For starters, if you have never been interested in hobby grade RC vehicles than you need to learn a bit about Losi. Losi is a top of the line RC designer co. with a history of making amazing, race ready vehicles. Why is that important? Before you ever open the box of your future Mini Desert truck (DT for short) you can know that it will be a quality product and backed by amazing customer support!

[The Truck}

The mini DT is RTR (ready to run) kit, and the truck itself looks great! The truck itself has a slightly extended chassis which adds stability to the truck. Although this truck is not built as a scale model of a real vehicle, there is a great amount of detail and realism in it. The sharp body design, realistic rollcage and chrome finished wheels bring this mini to another level.

This is also one of the few RTR mini RCs that comes with oil filled shocks and ball bearing pre-installed, which is a $40 value. Other than that, this is a standard hobby grade RC set-up. The adjustable shock mounts and gearing option allow for tons of customization.

[Radio]

The included radio is a standard 27MHz, which is unfortunate since the industry as a whole is moving towards 2.4 GHz radios. Not the radio does not do its job, it's just a bit outdated.

[My Experience]

Well the first thing I had to do was get a new charger. The one included can take up to 4 hours to charge it up once! After I had the battery ready to go it was tome to hit the dirt! I tried the Mini DT on 3 different surfaces to ge the best opinion possible, so I'll go through those one by one.

---Dirt Track---

On a standard dirt RC track the DT was right at home. Although the speed is not groundbreaing, it got around the track fast enough and had plenty of power on command (I might have judged the remote too harshly!). The suspension system soaks up bumps like a dream and I had full control while doing larger ramps and jumps.

---Carpet---

My local track also has an indoor carpet track. I thought trying it out here would be a good idea since little kids would most likely be driving one of these indoors on a similar surface. The truck performed well, since there are not many obstacles on a flat track. However one thing I want to mention; if you run this truck on a carpet surface, do not change the stoc gearing! If you have it set for speed runs and place on such a high traction surface like carpet you risk over heating the motor.

---Grass/Dirt---

I had to get this truck messy! Losi advertises this as a Desert type of road vehicle, so how well did it do? Ok. Yea, just OK. Size was the biggest limiting factor here, not power or quality. When driving it on grass the truck had difficulty keeping the rear end down, and therefore had trouble keeping power to the wheels. On dirt the truck did bettter, however it's light weight often made it bounce off dirt mounds rather than tackle them.