BEHIND THE WHEEL

Let’s get one thing out there right away: by design, the Night Crawler is slow. Not just trail-truck slow, but super slow--as in its top speed is 2mph. This is a feature, not a bug. As a true rock crawler, this rig is designed to do just one thing: crawl rover rocks (and similar obstacles) with a bottomless reserve of torque. That means ultra-low gearing, which is why the Night Crawler tops out at 2mph. Now that that’s cleared up, let’s get to crawlin’. I hit the woods and found a section with a lot of exposed roots and washed-out dirt, and I put my Night Crawler down to see how well it would do. The tires are similar to others that I have used on the trail, so I expected them to work well—and they did. I’ve also driven many scale trucks in the same spot, and the Night Crawler outcrawled all of them; it made it up and over the tall roots with ease. The compact pumpkins not only give the truck good ground clearance but their ultra-smooth surface also lets them slide easily on obstacles of all types. The high-ground-clearance chassis also aided in the great performance over the roots. My rock spot is a bit of a distance away, but instead of carrying the Night Crawler, I ran it the full distance to see how the worm gears coped with extended running. All worm gears operate with a fairly high amount of friction as the worm input gear slides along the output gear, and the axle housings were pretty warm around the gears. Under actual rock-crawling use where the gears don’t operate continuously, they’ll run cooler--but make sure they’re well lubed to be safe. On the rocks, the Night Crawler blew my mind. It had plenty of grip and plenty of ground clearance, and those gears lock up solid when you let off the throttle. This is one rig that will never roll off an obstacle once you get to the top. The axles and chassis easily cleared obstacles that would hang up other trucks. I expected some tippiness when sidehilling since the battery is mounted so high in the chassis, but the Night Crawler handled steeper angles than I expected. It’s an impressive machine.