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Originally Posted by terry.sc
It's a lot simpler to reverse engineer an r/c car than design it from scratch, if you've got an original to copy from. It took the designer at Tamiya 3 weeks to draw up the parts in CAD for the Sand Scorcher rerelease, just by measuring the original in their museum and tweaking the weak spots.
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That's a lot of CAD time, and you still haven't factored in all the time involved in producing all the molds, castings and stampings required to produce a car. And we're not talking about a (basically) all-plastic car like the SS, the RC10 was a multi-material car (alloy, nylon, fiberglass, steel).
Tamiya can get away with making repops because that's what they do, they're not really into the racing end of the biz, so they can afford to keep producing 30-year-old designs in limited numbers for comparatively high prices - because their customer base is primarily modelers/shelf-queeners.
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Considering racing is about 5% of the whole r/c car market there's no way an expensive race chassis would ever be anywhere near the biggest seller. maybe at American race tracks, but not in general and certainly not worldwide.
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You also need to consider total sales, and when you're talking "worldwide" the first thing you need to do is eliminate roughly 50% or so of the map being as they're impoverished third world countries that don't buy any (or hardly any) rc cars - and then factor in that for a company like AE they realize that somewhere about 50% or more of their total sales come just from the U.S. Some of you seem to forget just how large the U.S. is in comparison to any European country.
And finally, when talking about the whole "5% thing" you need to remember that AE is a racing company, they don't really have any history of making basher cars and those they did proved unpopular with buyers and unprofitable for their coffers. Any discontinued models have been rebranded exclusively under the ThunderTiger label head (B2, B3, T3, etc).