ORIGINAL: mupchu
Carbon Fiber is strong, but it is not flexable and it is very un-forgiving. Do your homework and you'll see that just because it is carbon does not make it better even if carbon is stronger.
I personally am not in the market for an RC8, and I don't like to get buggies (or any other RC's) on the cutting edge of development. I would not discount all the failure's racking up, but I don't think the buggy is made of glass either. Something tells me there will be some "upgrade" parts in the near future that will make it more bomb proof even if it is at the sacrifice of increasing weight.
Time will tell if this is really a great buggy or not, but one thing is for sure it is not built to bash at all.
I agree with mupchu, completely, but if I had not been running carbon shock towers on my CRT for 2 years with no problems whatsoever, I would not have purchased the RC8. I removed all the carbon fiber and dipped all the exposed edges in thin CA glue, I used a tooth pick dipped in CA to seal all the holes and I boiled the top plate for ten minutes. I had no failures and several people ran my RC8 at the end of the day and gave it a durability test for me by running into the end of a pipe 2 inches away from a spike at wide open throttle and another wot hit into a 12 inch spike at near wide open throttle along with cart wheels over a 30 foot long table top. I could not crash the thing all day except for a couple spin outs and flip or two but I did flat land it with after a good 30 ft flight all day long with no breakage and no loose or bent parts. I think there is a quality consistency issue with all RC cars, based on where they are coming from. I have seen air bubbles in composit parts and voids in carbon parts. With this system we use of designing the parts here and farming the work out over there, they are going to sneak in some cheap crap here and there to bolster there profits. This has happened with every new rc car to some extent.