A beautiful model of the Subaru Impreza World Rally Championship car, powered by the 6.0V ‘Jet Turbo’ battery pack.
With Taiyo’s manufacturing now moved to China (from Singapore, Malaysia, Japan) the quality of the hard body shells remained high, with good detail levels, excellent colors and decals, and good overall size. Unfortunately the similarities and improvements end once you turn the car over and view the chassis underneath.
Here we can see the vehicle chassis underwent considerable simplification, made much cheaper with less parts, limited suspension (typically only one or two shocks on the back, no ‘full shocks all around’ ), and lower power to ensure the product price was competitive with other Made in China products sold on the market.
While this version shown used Taiyo 6.0V ‘Jet Turbo’ battery packs, later models would default to 4xAA batteries, cancelling a decade old and widely successful strategy of ensuring customers bought Taiyo manufactured batteries for their RC vehicles, ensuring the business remained sustainable, and reducing the cost and waste of single-use batteries.
There is a reason you will see hundreds of 1986 Jet Hoppers / Turbo Hoppers being sold on eBay 30 years later, most of them still going strong, and zero 2003 Taiyo… Quality.
See the below comparison of chassis quality between this 2003 Taiyo Impreza and the 1989 Taiyo Lamborghini.
Left: 2003 Impreza. Right: 1989 Lamborghini.
The simplification and reduction of quality from near hobby-grade to definitively toy grade is obvious.
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