Vertical Racer RC car review

Fun or pointless?

26 December 2008 16:00 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Remote controlled cars are great until you hit a wall, until now that is. So can the vertical racer really drive you up the wall? We get racing to find out.

The Vertical Racer is a lightweight 1:42 scale of a full sized sports car, which comes in blue, black or red, and features working headlights, rearlights and measures 11.5 x 5.5 x 3cm.

It isn't your average racing car as once you've got it out of the packaging you soon realise it can go up walls thanks to a big noisy fan on the back that creates a vortex that sticks it to any flat vertical surface so you can drive it around unfettered by furniture.

Power comes from plugging the car into the remote control and, although fiddly, means that the car can be a lot lighter than it would otherwise be. There is a pay-off however; it doesn't last long between charges - you'll get around 10 minutes for 30 minutes of charge and to power the remote and charge the car you'll need a wallet-hurting six AA batteries.

A quick flick of the equally fiddly switch on the back means you can go from the wall to the floor. Annoyingly you can't do it on the fly.

Parents worried about tyre marks all over the walls shouldn't be - while on the surface those wheels look big and marking, (see pics) the underbelly of the car soon reveals that the car doesn't even have four wheels, but just two.

This in itself means you'll be doing more spinning than driving forwards or backwards, as well as meaning that it's going to struggle on carpet. We saw little action away from tiles, lino or floorboards. If you've got thick carpet you can forget about it.

Verdict

The Vertical Racer, which appears to be identical in every way to the Air Hogs Zero Gravity Micro we played with earlier in the year, lives up to its claim of letting you drive up the wall.

The catch? Well there aren't many but still some. It takes lots of batteries, the charging clip is fiddly, and you can't switch from wall to floor on the fly and after that 10 minutes of play you've got to charge it for a good 30 minutes (any less and your play time is reduced).

It's a fun idea, but we just wish it was so much better.

Score

Review Recap

Made by: Extreme Fliers
Price as reviewed: £27
The good: Can climb walls, easy to use
The bad: Takes six AA batteries to run, doesn't work on carpet, have to switch between floor and wall mode manually, takes forever to charge
Quick verdict: It's a fun idea, but we wish it was so much better
Score