I put some driving time on my TRX4 this weekend and it is quite good.
Pros:
- The diff locks work flawlessly and I like them much more than I ever thought I would. It feels like cheating locking the diffs to climb over an obstacle then unlocking them to make a tight turn and setting up the next line.
- The clearance the portals provide do wonders going over rocks and through the mud.
-Speaking of mud, the inner fenders and floor boards do a great job of keeping the chassis clean. After some mud bogging, sand throwing, and river crossing, the chassis didn't look much dirtier than it did fresh out of the box.
- It is remarkably stable for having such a heavy body. Many of my trucks are hard body scalers so I'm used to the heavy body driving style, if you live in the lexan world then your opinion may differ. I ran several off camber lines that I was sure would tip the TRX4 over but it made it through.
- With the diffs unlocked, it handles at speed pretty well (what we are all looking for out of a crawler :ror
. I was making nearly full throttle turns in high gear without flipping.
- The stock tires are about the best you will get in a RTR. They get pretty good grip but the foam isn't firm enough for adequate sidewall support. Others I drove with liked the tires but I'm just not sold on them as a legitimately good tire.
Cons:
- The steering servo is way underpowered; it can't turn the wheels once met by a light bind. It has to go sooner than later.
- The battery tray is good if you run really big batteries or really small batteries but not so much for those in between. Most of my trucks run on packs that are around 100 mm long (typical 2200mah 3S), which a lot of other people run as well. These packs are too long to fit in the smaller, lower portion of the tray and too small to lay across the smaller portion of the tray. There should have been some more though put into non-Traxxas sized packs when designing the tray.
Other notes:
- The gearing in the 2 speed is too wide to be that useful. Low gear is really low and high gear is really fast. If the ratio on the high gear was brought closer to low gear then probably would have used that feature more. Most of the time I left it in low gear.
- While I really like the locking diffs, I only really used the all locked or all unlocked settings. The locked/open setting doesn't seem that useful so a 2 position switch with a Y-harness would have been fine for most people.
- The ESC comes out of the box set to "trail mode" which means it has drag brake and double tab reverse. Most people will want to set it to "crawler mode" with drag brake and instant reverse.
- There are 4 holes in the bar of the exo-cage above the windshield, these are perfect for holding the body clips. "thumbsup"
- I tried the cruise control feature; it felt pointless and lazy to use but at least it was easy to set.
Overall, the good far outweighs the bad and there are opportunities for improvement like on any truck. The TRX4 is the best experience I have had with a RTR crawler out of the box. Now that I have driven the bone stock truck, I'm going to take the opportunity to do an normal RTR teardown (check gear mesh, threadlock screws, grease gears, etc) and swap in some better electronics for the next shakedown run.
