Two Christmases in a row, I got a radio-controlled car from Radio Shack. Two years in a row, that car was dead by New Year's. I never asked for one again.
When I was about 8 or so, I had a friend who was all excited about the remote controlled car he found in the RadioShack catalog that advertised "scale speeds of 60 mph!!!". It was only about $40. What a deal!
He cashed in all his parental good will and actually got them to order it for him. Then it came and the 1:20 scale car basically went about 60/20 mph and we did the math... I felt bad for him, but hey... they didn't exactly lie!
I suspect he was. I used to take Radio Shack R/C cars and re-purpose them into robots. The best ones used treads as that would allow for differential steering which was much easier on the inverse kinematics than the front wheel steering. And Radio Shack always had a 'closeout/clearance' junk table that said R/C cars would end up on.
That experience lead me to understand that a common failure mode was that the radio receiver circuit had some tuning caps on it that would get jostled about, causing the car to cease responding. Not sure why they went with trim caps other than it meant everything else could be wider tolerances if they just tuned it once fully assembled. It did lead to a lot of fallout though.
