Kei trucks are already some of the smallest commercial vehicles you’ll see out on the road, and if you’ve got a soft spot for the toy side of things, you can also find plenty of cute kei RC cars. But one builder, [Victor], wanted something a little different—so he went for Truck-Kun energy with a 1:3 scale kei truck built to show off at a recent anime convention.
The result is modeled on the Suzuki Carry, and it’s not exactly “tiny.” The chassis starts with what’s become a classic hacker move: a bunch of old hoverboard motors. These are brushless hub motors, and the appeal is obvious—easy to drive, and they have plenty of torque right out of the box. From there, the frame is basically a simple ladder setup, with a hoverboard wheel at each corner. The body? That part is handmade and a bit scrappy in the best way: cardboard plus paint, and a few 3D printed bits to help hold everything together.
For steering, he didn’t overcomplicate things. A leadscrew paired with a stepper motor from an old 3D printer does the job. Then the control stack gets its own layer of DIY logic. RP2040s are used to talk to the motor controllers, while an ESP32-S3 handles communication with an Xbox One controller. That controller is the user interface—directional commands in, the truck moves. It’s the kind of setup that sounds simple until you’ve actually tried to make it behave smoothly.
At the convention—Anime Los Angeles—the truck reportedly stood tall over most other kei RC cars. It looked like it belonged there, too. There’s a small, very real moment in the story: the builder is said to have heard the machine drive off at full throttle—then, well, that was that.
Because the whole thing ended in tears. The 100-pound machine accidentally drove at full throttle into a wall and smashed itself to pieces. Still, that mishap doesn’t read like the end of the project. [Victor] is treating the crash as motivation—basically an excuse to build a better one for next year. You can almost see the mental checklist already: strengthen the impact area, rethink the safety behavior, maybe tune the control response so it’s harder to lunge like that.
And honestly, this is exactly the kind of build that keeps coming back around. We love a good RC project with real engineering decisions behind it, not just a “plug it in and hope” vibe. Add in kei trucks, which are already a whole personality, and you’ve got something people want to watch in person—especially when it’s big enough to dominate the scene. The next one can’t come soon enough, even if the last one met its fate rather abruptly—like, right there, gone.
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