New Truck

[TRUCKMAKER]

The manufacturers could drive this as far as what Tamiya releases. Take Daimler for instance, they own Mercedes, Freightliner, WesternStar and a few others. They have provided Tamiya with drawings for the Actros, Arocs and the Freightliner Cascadia. That’s why these are very detailed. I worked for Daimler when the Cascadia kit was released, they made videos of the completed trucks with trailers running around the headquarters in Portland Or. and offered the kits to employees at 50% off. They all so got with Tower Hobby and put together an easy order list for a radio, charger battery and MFU for the people who wanted one but werent already in the hobby. Before all this was done Tamiya released the Knight Hauler on there own. It’s the original Freightliner Coranado unbadged and the only thing Tamiya changed was the headlights and the shape of the fenders around them, so it can go both ways. The biggest thing is sales they could make all kinds of truck models but it’s a niche market and probably don’t sell as many as you think plus a retail outlet isn’t going to stock very many if any due to there size, takes up space for items that sell more.

[Fury Fan]

Originally Posted by TRUCKMAKER

The biggest thing is sales they could make all kinds of truck models but it’s a niche market and probably don’t sell as many as you think plus a retail outlet isn’t going to stock very many if any due to there size, takes up space for items that sell more.

What he said.
1. The 1/14 truck market is small compared to the rest of the RC vehicle world.
2. For the rest of the RC vehicle world, most isn't driven toward realism - even the realistic ones that are mass-produced, well, the realism is limited to what is molded into the polycarbonate body. (there are exceptions, of course, but not much in comparison).
3. For those that have been around injection molding - you know how expensive that tooling is, and then to sell a small volume of kits from it?

Ideally, they would create a universal chassis kit, 2-3 old-school wheel kits, and then some limited-run cab kits from soft tooling. 3-D scanning and rapid prototyping now make this more viable than ever - but they'd need to invest manpower to analyze the market and determine what to offer - IMHO that's the biggest hangup.