mrpyo

I recently bought small cheap electric car with digital turning and even despite it's obvious crappiness it's still a lot of fun. Sadly few minutes pass and it's over - I need to recharge the battery.

So here comes my question - what's average running time of more expensive electric RC cars? Is it possible to drive for over an hour?

I don't need it to be fast, even the one I have now is way too fast for me and I seemingly drive it on "slow' setting...

PS. To RC Universe administrators - it's really bad idea to store user passwords in plain text...

SyCo_VeNoM

depends
can be anywhere from 5 mins to an hour or so depending on how big of a battery you can shove in it, or how many you can hook in parallel
for instance on my one RC a 5000mah battery can get 30-45 mins of run time, and on my other its 15 mins
One of my test RC's (was a custom experimental rig) ran so long my finger got sore from holding the throttle, and the power was only like half spent.

RustyUs

Would like to know more about what "cheap" vehicle you're talking about, and the size in milliamp hours (mah) that the battery pack is.
What is the battery made of i.e. Nickle Cadmium (NiCd), Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMh), or Lithium Polymer (LiPo)?
Do you own a peak charger?

For me...I have a 1/10 scale stadium truck that uses 7.4v 4000mah batteries. With a mild modified motor...I get 12~20 minutes per charge. It all depends on the gearing, and how hard I run the truck and the quality of the batteries.

RustyUs

If you only have a "wall wart" slow/trickle charger and have to guess at the capacity of the battery, I would highly suggest into getting some sort of peak charger that will sense the maximum input that a battery can handle.

mrpyo

It's called GX Buggy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ8bLInr6bs They don't even provide specs other than "3.7V Li-Po" (I found it - it's 30 mAh - well, it's tiny after all)...

I know this hobby is about building stuff, but I would just like to know if I can buy ready solution (I mean, I'm planning to buy other car in the future) that can ride for about 30 minutes in 200$ range (I may also add that I prefer to ride in-doors so I would prefer car to be small).

RustyUs

OK, now I know what you are dealing with.

Scratch that what I said earlier about the peak charger.

I had a same issue with a small RC Heli for my daughter. They come with a mini 1 cell LiPo battery. I went on eBay and found those mini 1 cell LiPos for cheap $. There should be something printed on the cell inside the buggy. If you are good at soldering, you can buy a mini LiPo cell that has double/triple the mah rating than the stock one, solder the new battery to the buggy.

That is probably your only option to increase run time.

mrpyo

I don't think it's worth the bother since I would probably have to buy specialized Li-Po charger (since I guess the one included with the car I have, couldn't handle high capacity battery, could it?).
I'm just looking for a car with the long running time that I could buy in the future...

RustyUs

If thinking about getting something else in the toy grade"mini" RC class...I would suggest jumping up to a larger scale... maybe like 1:24 scale that comes with a battery pack that can be taken out and charged on a charger.

Buying something that has the battery inclosed and not meant to be taken out, limits upgradingability like the Tomy you have. Sorry.

EXT2Rob

My Feedback: (1)

Losi and ECX have come out with 1/24 and even 1/32 scale micros .

nitrosportsandrunner

ECX's is a rebranded toy grade model. decently quick, but not proportional steering.
HPI is going to a release a 1/32 that looks like the Baja in December.

Maxamps recently release a 2s lipo battery....and they drove a Axial scx10 crawler for 8 hours on a single charge! But then, rock crawlers don't draw as much amps as fast rc's do.
A redcat RS10 rock crawler with its stock 2000mah nimh battery gets a half hour of runtime. My exceed 1/8 scale rock crawler gets 1.5 hours on a 5000mah 2s lipo.