Fast Lane Pro-Buggy

September 2012
air hogs heli cage

Street Price: $21.99 US
Manufacturer: Fast Lane RC
Mfgr's recommended min. age: 6+
Our recommended age range: 4-8
Primary use: Indoor or outdoors
Top speed: ~3mph
Runtime per charge: ~15 mins
Controller: 27mhz AM
Includes:

  • Assembled car
  • Controller
  • Instructions
Requires:
  • 3x AA batteries for the vehicle
  • 1x 9V battery for the controller

Overview

Fast Lane RC's Pro-Buggy is a micro-sized, low-budget vehicle that comes in either buggy style, as the name suggests, or racing truck style. They're identical in main construction & performance, they just have different thin body shells on top for different looks. A small chassis with a small radio to go with it, this is intended more for smaller kids. No batteries are included, and I recommend that you use rechargeable batteries for the vehicle itself to minimize waste. With a few sets of batteries and a quick charger, you can keep a vehicle like this in play almost continually.

Test & Review Video

Conclusion

Well, for the price, the little Fast Lane RC Pro-Buggy is a cool vehicle, it just won't do much off-road driving in spite of its off-road style. This disagrees with Fast Lane's own promotional video which shows the thing drifting at high speed & doing some jumps through moderately rough loose dirt, in addition to a lot of highly edited on-road footage. Near the end of their promo video, the fine print conveniently says, "Enhanced Photography Used. Actual Performance Will Vary." What they're doing there is admitting that what you're seeing in the video is falsified. It's a lie. The reason for admitting this? Not guilt. No. Fear of class action lawsuits for the patently false advertising is the reason. That's sad. A little infurating & offensive too. People at toy companies who order up these blatantly deceptive commercials & or descriptions are just tricking buyers like us, betting that once we open the box and learn that the product doesn't perform as advertised we will:

  1. Assume it's our fault, that we should have known better and read the fine print.
  2. Consider taking the product back to the store, but decide against it because it's too much trouble.
  3. Just suck it up and live with it.

Yeah, I hate being lied to, and I even more deeply hate it when my fellow RC Maniacs are lied to.

Nevertheless, the little Pro-Buggy is a vehicle I would recommend for young kids as their first full-function RC car to use on hard surfaces, and I think the price is right.

B+