Big Squid RC

Hola amigo’s, I trust you all had an epic weekend and are ready for another grind. At least there is always THE Cub Report to get your work week kicked off the right way.

This is the second Cub Report I’ve typed up using 9 fingers. A couple of years ago while catching trucks falling out of the sky at our i-Hobby demo one of my fingers got chewed up by a spur gear, and I chewed up another one on Saturday. I tend to be pretty core though, I’m quite certain that even if all ten of my digits were FUBAR I’d be typing this out with my nose, one slow letter at a time. As they say- the show must go on.

Speaking of show… I’m official tired of the Vettel runaway show and want to change the channel. Even the uber robotic charisma of Kimi Räikkönen can’t overcome how tired I am of a Vettel dominating yet another F1 race. “Sigh”. Maybe the engine changes next year will put someone new at the front of the pack.

Even though I could easily bench race about F1 or Supercross for a couple thousand words a week, Brian insists that I actually touch on rc. “Double Sigh”.

We got to talking about “bubbles” the other day in the office, specifically it started with Bitcoins, then made the rounds to housing, the stock market, and then of course to tulips. The conversation eventually made a turn to rc, that’s what we eat/breathe/sleep around here, and because our hobby has never had a speculative “bubble”, it turned to talk about HPI and Associated.

It’s been a long time since HPI has announced a new car. Yes, sure, they’ve had some issues of late, no doubt part of the reason for their lack of newly announce cars, but is that even a bad thing? We’ve been “trained” for years now to expect a new car announcement from a manufacture every month or so, so when we don’t see it we kinda say to ourselves, “OMG, HPI hasn’t announced anything for like 6 months, they must be screwed!”. Hopefully the recent lack of new releases leads to a series of all new and uber HPI product for us all to enjoy.

Associated is a good example of a company that announces a new car very frequently. They just announced their new Apex 18th scale TC (and MT) which is basically their old RC18 platform re-badged under their Qualifier Series of bashing gear. Just what good is it to the hobby that AE decided to put out an old design under a new logo?

What causes an economic “bubble” is when the price of an item has been pumped up to be much greater than its intrinsic value. For example, the “new” Associated QS 18th scalers are old tech, yet their price is right in-line with what new tech would/should be. The product itself doesn’t do anything to take the hobby forward, yet it costs as much as a better, newer, product should. And its not like AE is the only company doing it, several of them are (hint, hint, TRX).

So how does this all tie in together? Putting out old and overpriced gear is bad for the hobby. Putting out new, original, and superior product is good. I think we’d all like to see manufactures put the time/money/effort into actual new product once every 6 months than to put out some old re-hashed car every 2 weeks. Old/overpriced gear leaves consumers ticked off, new innovative product makes for long term hobbyists.

Yes, it’s certainly tempting to make the short term cash of putting out a new car every week and filling shelves with inferior product. A lot of the makers and shakers in the hobby are getting older and staring right at retirement in the next decade, and a few of them act like they don’t care if they kill off the hobby 15 years down the road.

All I’m saying is that all that old regurgitated gear is wayyyyy overpriced for what it is, and that consumers deserve better. The companies putting out all this regurgitated gear should care more about their customers and the long term future of our hobby.

That’s it for this week ya freaks, support your local hobby shops and bash spots when ya can.

YOUR Cub Reporter