Back to the RC future

So as everyone is going on about Back to the Future Day today. I thought it would be interesting to see how many of the predictions we made in a Blog post a long time ago when this blog was in it's infancy.  There were 10 predictions, so let's see if we were actually on the money.

1. Nimhs will be extinct: The days of matched batteries will be long gone. Everyone will use Life or Lipo batteries in race cars. Even 1/12 stock cars will have made the move to brushless motors and lipo batteries (In hard cases after one in a soft case goes pop in a collision).

Well It looks like I was on the money here. I don't think I see any of these when racing anywhere now other than in the Bangers at my local club. I am sure there might be somewhere doing matched cells but it is pretty uncommon.

2. There will be no Crystals: 2.4ghz radios will become very cheap and everyone will use them.
Another win.. although they are all wheels :(

3: Mardave will rule the world: Ok not actually that, but I think one of the barriers for onroad racing is cost and Mardaves with their V12 will become a popular entry level class for beginners to race onroad because it is cheap and fun.
Well not actually right here, GT12 has become a thing though so I suppose I can have that as a pretty good guess, but GT12 is very much a UK thing and not popular anywhere else.

4: F1 will have UK nationals again: It seems to be getting popular again and if this momentum keeps going we will soon get a national series all off our own.
I think I had time on my side here, as in all this time the class has had a spike (when I started writing this blog) and then it almost died. However as is normally the case, things have come around and F1 has become much more popular again. It has a BRCA series, and also the clubman series is going to have F1 as a support class.

5: Slow will be the new fast: 10.5 motors will become too quick for clubs, so we will run slower brushless motors, then the speed controllers will also make things quicker (Super added software punch!) and then we will ban that as well because our cars will easily be able to do 88mph indoors :)
Sort of right. At the time we were running 10.5 motors thinking they were the equivalent of a 19t motor but nowadays 13.5 motors are just as quick, if not quicker. I didn't get the super-punch idea quite right, but we now have Boost and turbo so I was sort of on the right ball-park.

6: 100mph R.T.R cars: Cars can already do 70+ mph and technically brushless motors with large batteries should easily be able to go really fast. So I imagine all R.T.R manufacturers will be after making a car that would be able to do over 100mph as that would be quite tempting for people who are not into the hobby.
Ok, only one manufacturer did it, Traxxas made the awesome XO-1 so I am partly right. Although no one else has tried to compete.

7: RC will be banned in public places: See above there could be a spate of bad accidents where people are irresponsible with their 100mph cars!
I'm glad to say we were wrong on the above.

8: Touring chassis will look different: The move to new batteries and brushless motors will make some designers look at how they can move the weight around to get a better balanced car. One belt designs, or maybe even shaft drive cars will come back?
There have been a few changes and there are some innovative cars or little parts, but the majority of the chassis are still very similar to what was raced back then.

9: Nitro cars will not exist: Brushless cars will be faster, more reliable and a lot less noisy, so why run nitro?
Ok so not right here, Nitro's have their place but there are more bashers using brushless nowadays than back then.

10: And for the Oh I wish I had put money on that prediction... Tamiya will win the next 1/10 worlds: Marc Rheinard is on fire and the TRF is still the best car out there, they could win all the 3 worlds between now and 2015.
Nearly right. Tamiya managed 2010 and 2012, unfortunately Yokomo spoiled the party and could have cost me some cash if I had bet on the result above.

Ok, so now it is 2015, what sort of things do we think will be happening over the next few years in our hobby.