What you need to know | 9 out of 10 stars (10 out of 10 for looks!)

JY66 - Review

Looks: I am incredibly impressed with how this non-licensed Jeep body looks. It really is worth the money just for the body. All the doors and trunk actually open. It has a fully detailed interior. Spare tire on the back and you can purchase with the top, or just as a convertible. You can also decide if you want an extra battery and roof rack with light bar. Without the detailed body this car would rate around a 5, it really makes that big of a difference here for me and the main selling point for this car.

Capability: I think the most important thing to keep in mind is the price point here. This is almost half the cost of the smaller SCX24. If you are expecting SCX24 capability in this size of a car, you are easily looking at over 4 times the cost of the JY66. The price of the JY66 is in line with toy grade New Bright crawlers, so I will review it in that light, while being very straight forward what it can and can't do.

The JY66 can drive over most anything that is about 1/2 to 3/4 as tall as the tires. The weight to power ratio really keeps it from crawling over anything taller, I found this to be much more fun driving on a dirt/pebble nature trail than crawling rocks like I do with my SCX24s. I really would say calling this a "crawler" isn't completely correct. The other issue with crawling is it is very top heavy and wants to flip over often.  

On trail runs I get about 10-15 minutes per stock battery before the performance drops. It will run on a smooth surface for about 30 minutes. Once the power starts to drop it can't crawl over objects as easily. I am planning to upgrade the battery to a larger capacity as my first upgrade. The really nice thing is the battery is very quick to change, so you can take it on longer trails without much headache if you need to change batteries a few times.

Build Quality: Body quality is unbelievable in this price point. The only ding I have right now and why it is 9 instead of 10 out of 10, is how weak the servo is for the weight of the car. It struggles to turn the wheels if you are pinned against an object or dropped down off a ledge. 

Overall: I am extremely happy with this car and would buy it again. Don't expect hobby grade performance, but for most people this isn't an issue. If you have less than $100 to spend, this would be my pick of cars available.