HPI micro RS4 review

As the nights draw in and the weather is getting very cold outside, I thought I would get myself an RC car to have a bit of fun with indoors. With 1/10 scale products too big and impractical to use in the house, I was having to choose whether to go for a 1/24 crawler, or a 1/18 scale Drift car. Due to our house having laminate flooring in the kitchen, I thought I would go for the HPI Micro RS4.

The Micro RS4 is available in a couple of different body versions, but I went for the Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R in the Fail Crew livery. You can get a couple of different bodies including Ken Block’s Fiesta in various liveries, however with the Fiesta body you should need to look at purchasing additional body mounts for the Fiesta body to fit.

In the box you get everything needed to get up and running except a pack of 4 AA batteries for your transmitter. So all I had to do was put the battery for the car on charge and put some AA batteries in the transmitter, and once the car battery was charged, it was time to have a play!

The car is really nice to drive on laminate flooring, the throttle control and steering input is really nice and smooth through the transmitter. While the car is 4WD you can get some lovely power slides on and it is so controllable, much better than I was expecting to be honest! There is plenty of torque from the 180 sized motor too.

I haven’t used the car outside on smooth tarmac, but that’s purely down to the scale size of the car and I just bought it to use indoors. If it was me I would be careful when using it on tarmac outside purely as a small stone is going to seem like a big boulder with the 1/18 scale size of the car.

Overall the car has surprised me, I have noticed that as I type this, a number of parts are available in store, and if they aren’t the suppliers do have them in stock too. The only issue with HPI is as the parts come direct from the Netherlands it does take around 1-2 weeks if not a little longer to get to the shop. Most of the other manufacturers we sell, we have UK based suppliers so we can get parts usually within 2-3 working days with a number of them, so that’s something I would just bear in mind if you are after a car where you can get parts either from ourselves or our suppliers within a short time frame.