Three buggy motors, all 1900kV:

• Tekin T8 Gen3 4030
• Reds Racing Gen3 V8
• Hobbywing Xerun 4268 G3

All top-choice motors, IMO, but between those three, what are the performance differences? Are there any? The Reds motor is the only motor with a published wattage of 1850W. No idea what the others are.

Anyone have any data, or anecdotal evidence and/or claims as to the differences or performance benefits of either? Is comparing PERFORMANCE* of electric motors not worth the time and effort because they're more or less all created equal and/or finding all the specs (e.g., wattage, no-load current, resistance, etc) is not practical because they're essentially unpublished numbers?

* Not talking truggy vs. buggy motors, where an obvious physical size increase offers more power/torque. Other than performance, different manufacturers offer better designs than others. For example, the Reds has two sensor ports: one on the end, and one on the top. This is an awesome feature. The Reds, however, is the heaviest of the three. The Tekin offers a sensor cable tie-down. That's nice. Finally, the HW offers an apparent benefit if connected to a HW ESC (i.e. full sensor mode). Timing adjustments become available.

​​​​​​​I can't answer your question as I've not tried any of these motors, but this part caught my eye. In general it's not true, it's mostly marketing to encourage you to buy a Hobbywing ESC. As long as it follows the industry standard for the sensor port, any sensored ESC should work properly with any sensored motor. Minor caveat that mixing 2 pole vs 4 pole might confuse things.

I can only speak about my experience with HobbyWing motors as they have become my trusted brand of choice over the past decade. In the past the average lifespan of my HW motors were between 1-2 years of weekly club racing.


All that changed over COVID, they released a new G3 line of motors which have been plagued with durability issues ranging from bad bearings to premature wear on the shaft as well as faulty sensor boards. I'm averaging between 4 to 15 race days before I experience a motor failure lately. I had stocked up on replacement motors so I'm technically still running HobbyWing today, but I am in the process of exploring other brands that will hopefully last longer than the junk that HobbyWing is producing lately. HW doesn't sell parts for their motors, they are disposable if something goes wrong making them too expensive for me to remain a loyal customer anymore Another issue is that the bad motor often takes out the ESC with it, doh!


I'm going to give Trinity a try next, they are hard to find in stock, and I'm hoping that's because they are very desirable.

Great information and personal perspective with HW motors--thanks for sharing! And with respect to the above quote, I totally forgot about Trinity. They were a great motor company back in the early 90's, from my experience, but they don't offer much in terms of 1/8 scale motors nowadays. Looks like only one option for buggy @ 69mm can length: 2000KV. No specs listed, other than the typical. However, maybe they're doing something different, or it's higher-power because the Trinity is slightly heavy at 330g! Another company worth checking out is Ruddog (1800KV, 2000KV, and 2200KV options available).

Hi there
I am still running the og 1900k hobbywing motor
It has been flawless with bearing changes every 6 months or so
Motor is no slower than competitors.
Thinking of upgrading from xr8 sct esc to newer but have no reason too.
Scary the price of modern electrics

The only thing the newer HW motor and ESC combos will do (I believe), is the "coast" feature that's supposed to be more like a brushed motor as it keeps turning a bit after you let off the throttle. It's pretty strange, if you flip over the wheels keep turning for a bit. Kind of the opposite of drag brake, like drag throttle. It makes jumping difficult/weird for me, so I don't use it.

I run all HW and CC ESCs in sensored/sensorless mode. So they are only running sensored on startup.

As for expensive ESCs; the HW XR8 SCT was under $100 before it went out of stock, and CC Mamba X could be had for $130 last week from Tower.
As long as you steer clear of Tekin, prices are actually pretty good these days (if there is availability)!

Coast will work on a non-HW motor too. It's purely an ESC feature. And no it's not like a brushed motor, those slow down a lot when you let off the throttle. Early brushless ESCs added drag brake to emulate that behaviour as people found it difficult to get accustomed to how much brushless motors will naturally coast compared to brushed ones.