I like the look of the new chassis...I think it seems very solid and prepared to take a beating. There are a lot of innovative things in this vehicle... little things like the body clip retainers and pull tabs and much bigger engineering things like the triple locking diffs.
I looked through the manual at some of the maintenance procedures because at first glance getting into that thing looks like a mess. But going further it appears that they thought about the maintenance aspect and perhaps it isn't too bad. Being able to get to the motor and servo is certainly easier than their 1/10th vehicles. The front and rear diff access doesn't seem so bad. The slipper can be adjusted easily. The diffs are locked and unlocked from the radio on the fly.
The one thing I noticed was taking off the receiver box so you can disconnect channel 1 was required before dropping the motor/gearbox/center diff/servo assembly... you have to remove the receiver box cover to replace the slipper pads, to work on the center diff, to change a pinion or motor, to remove the receiver, to remove the servo, to remove the ESC or to work on the diff brain. I think the first thing I would do would be to buy a servo extension and use that so I could disconnect the servo and drop the center assembly without having to remove four screws and the receiver box cover so often. For all the thinking that they obviously put into this vehicle, removing the receiver box cover seems like a dumb process to have to repeat so often for so many unrelated tasks.
The other thing I get concerned with at first glance is the two screws on the skid plate... it gets removed for a lot of maintenance work and I would be concerned about stripping the threads on the chassis side... If only one of them strips that's 50% of what is retaining the skid plate.
For all that they thought of I don't know why they didn't expand the bumpers... big tires with little protection always seems like a bad idea to me.... I'm sure T-Bone will have something soon enough though.
And why would they make a "Wheelie" mode in the diffs and not have a wheelie bar included stock... <shakes head>