quick revival of this thread
http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/what-cheap-toy-rc-car-for-5-year-old

Stoner Jr Jr birthday coming up. He’ll be 7.

Big into Transformers on the TV at the moment.
More than enough lego and books to keep him going.
Thinking of something a bit fun like an RC car.

The thread above is very useful. Any original posters got any follow-up to add?

Is a £70 Helios worth it? Or would something a bit cheaper and the expectation that it will only hold his interest for a few weeks make more sense? Crawlers or racers?

Any other awesome present recommendation for 7yr old boy?

£469.00 to spend did you say?

The Helios would be good. I’ve got a 1/18 LaTraxx SST which is great fun (and made by Traxxas so really robust. However my son who’s 6 absolutely loves his Carrera MarioKart. It’s ‘on road’ only but has stood up to a million curb crashes and hops of the curb quite happily. It keeps the interest far more than my more serious cars.

I got and built a Hornet with mine

Tamiya Hornet

.. though I got a bundle for £120 with controller, batteries etc.

Was a fun project to do together, and the end result is epic.

son who’s 6 absolutely loves his Carrera MarioKart. It’s ‘on road’ only but has stood up to a million curb crashes and hops of the curb quite happily. It keeps the interest far more than my more serious cars.

interesting. On road is still OK for us. Why is it more entertaining for him?

My 6yr old loves his Maisto rock crawler. Got rid of the tamiya ‘fast’ car. Too much for such a young kid, kept smashing into stuff and had to be in open supervised spaces.

With the rock crawler I can leave him to it, he builds courses, smashes toy cars, that sort of stuff.

It’s also great fun in public spaces without being anti social.

Because it actually looks like Mario is driving around the cul-de-sac. Mario also actually tips one way or the other as he steers, and you can get other characters to race.

crawler is my preference for being able to have as much fun indoors as out.

will look into mariokart too
cheers

My 7y/o got a Nikko Vaporizer (sp?) for Christmas – it’s cheap, but surprisingly good fun.

Have a Google for MB models, then RTR models most of what you find there you can get spares for unlike the toys r us type cars that once they are broke they are scrap. If in doubt ring the shop and have a chat they are decent guys and will help you out.

Crawler +1.

Crawler fun.

My five-year-old has a Maisto 3XL rock crawler, it’s superb for him and I suspect a seven-year-old too.

It’s fast enough on flat ground that he had to jog to keep up (just) but will climb some seriously impressive steps/rocks/logs. It is also very water-resistant and can float (large volume tyres). I know this as we have two streams running through our property and the boy has driven it pretty much from one end of each stream to the other. Great fun building obstacle courses for it to tackle, too.

i asked the same years ago when my kid was a similar age, this…

https://www.modelsport.co.uk/tamiya-mad-bull/rc-car-products/226

loads of fun to make, kid can paint the shell themself, and despite all i thought an electric r/c would be like its so crazy fast its amazing. wheel spins and do-nuts galore.

just get extra batteries as the run time is only 15mins or so.

cheers all
I got a crawler that user videos seemed to show it not being crap.