Remote-controlled cars are little bundles of joy that, given some space, can deliver hours upon hours of fun. Any gearhead who’s spent real time with an RC car has probably wondered what it’d be like to pilot a full-size car with a remote control. I know I have.
As it turns out, so long as you have the know-how, it doesn’t take a whole lot of money to convert your average Facebook Marketplace junker into a fully functioning full-size RC car, complete with a working accelerator pedal, brake pedal, and steering system all operated via radio control.
Cleon Wenger, an enthusiast who recently went viral for his full-size remote-controlled car antics on TikTok, spoke with me over the phone about what inspired him to create a fully modular system, which cost him just $500 in parts to build, that can easily be moved from one vehicle to another for some truly spectacular backyard antics.
The Beauty Of Time And Space
Wenger lives in the town of Dundee, a small village in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. He’s a woodworker by trade, but he’s been a gearhead all his life. “Growing up, I was always around mechanic work,” he told me. “My dad fixed tractors. Ever since I was probably 12 years old, I could rebuild an engine.”
When he’s not helping to assemble houses off the coast of Seneca Lake, he’s hanging out with his friends doing all sorts of wild stuff. He owns a large property outside of town that includes several acres of open field space. Down the road, his friend owns a similar plot of land. It’s these places that he and his squad get up to tomfoolery.
“[On] evenings and weekends I get together with my buddies, and you never know [what’s going to happen],” Wenger quips. “We probably have half a dozen four-wheelers and side-by-sides. My buddy has a 64-acre property with a nice, big pond on it. We have our fun days on the weekends.”
One look at Wenger’s TikTok channel shows the type of stuff he and his friends get into. They’re using excavators as tire swings, driving trucks through deep mud pits, drifting 80-horsepower custom go-karts around—all the stuff I’d be doing if I had the time, space, and bravery.
An Idea Is Formed
Wenger’s first viral moment came in September 2024, when he published a video to his YouTube channel, CrankshaftComedy, of him and his friends rigging up a Dodge Dakota to drive itself through a silo in an open field. Instead, the truck bounced off the silo, kept accelerating, and struck a skidsteer further into the property.
Unlike Wenger’s later remote-controlled stuff, this Dakota setup was far more crude. “We just locked the steering wheel and pulled a block on the throttle,” he told me. There was no provision for brakes, in case the truck kept going after the impact, which is what ultimately led to the truck hitting the skidsteer.
Wenger went on to say the above video was stolen from his account and reposted by bigger channels, which is how it eventually went viral.
“Somebody else got it off my YouTube channel and put it on their popular page, and that’s where it really took off,” he said.
Because of that, Wenger didn’t see much channel growth from the video. But its popularity inspired him to make a more refined setup for future antics.
“My idea was that if I want to do this again, I want to be able to have better control over the vehicle.”
Here’s How It Works
This past winter, Wenger set out to make such a system a reality. Self-taught in the art of Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining and the use of plasma-cutting tables, he decided to base his design on something familiar to him.
For a car with an automatic transmission, you need to control three basic inputs to make it work: The steering, the throttle pedal, and the brake pedal. So Wenger decided to use stepper motors to control each input. Stepper motors, like most electric motors, use electromagnetic forces to spin a moving rotor inside a stator (the stationary part of the motor that produces the magnetic field).
Stepper motors are commonly used for stuff like CNC machines, plasma-cutting tables, and robotic manufacturing arms, as they’re simple to control, provide good torque at low speeds, and don’t need extra sensors to precisely stop the rotor at a given position, according to motor producer Monolithic Power. Here’s a video showing how the rotor can be moved and positioned within the stator in a stepper motor:
In Wenger’s design, one motor is mounted directly to the steering rack, where the steering wheel would normally sit. Another is mounted on a rail on the floor that controls a splined rod, which actuates a block that bolts to the brake pedal. The final motor is attached to a lever with a bearing at the other end, allowing it to roll on and off the throttle pedal when activated.
The three motors are controlled via a collection of boards packed into a box that’s ratchet-strapped onto the passenger seat. Inside the remote control—a custom handheld 3D-printed box powered by a wireless drill battery—three potentiometers, which, according to Same Sky Devices, are simply resistors that can be manually adjusted to change the voltage output to a circuit, allowing precise control of the motors. One of the potentiometers is connected to a makeshift wheel, while the throttle and brake are controlled by sliders.
For all of the coding, Wenger told me he simply used the internet and his own determination to figure it out.
“All the information is out there,” he told me. “You just have to take time to study, try [something], troubleshoot it, and see why it doesn’t work. It takes a lot of time to figure out how programming works. Opening a board out of the box and looking at it, you have to go, ‘All right, how does this work?’ And you just start studying—trial and error. You just learn it as you go. You put your effort into it, and if it doesn’t work, you just go online. Somebody else has probably had the same issue.”
Wenger also told me he relied on ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, for some of the programming, but learned that it’s not a totally omnipotent resource.
“ChatGPT has helped me out a lot,” he said. “[It] can do some code, but you have to understand it enough to know what to ask for or to know what to feed into it, so it brings the right stuff back.”
Wenger even took the time to engineer a safety element into the design so that if the passenger-mounted control box loses signal with the handheld remote, it automatically engages the brake pedal. Pretty smart, considering this is a moving, full-size car with no one behind the wheel, and he reckons the antennas only have about a mile of range.
But what’s most impressive, to me anyway, is the total cost Wenger estimates he’s put into this project. He told me $500 would get someone “pretty close” to all you’d need, hardware-wise, including the motors, the control boards, and all of the 3D-printing materials. That doesn’t include the countless hours of labor Wenger’s put in, of course, but still, that’s a pretty small amount of money to convert a whole car into a fully working RC car.
The Antics Get Even More Spectacular
Another beauty of this setup is that it’s pretty modular, with few modifications needed to move it from one car to another. The throttle and brake controls are mounted onto a piece of metal that’s bolted into the floorboard, while the steering motor mounts to the column via an adapter and some vice grips. As I mentioned earlier, the control box is strapped to the passenger seat, and everything is powered by a 12-volt battery in the passenger footwell.
Before its appearance in the Nissan Altima, where it sits now, the system was run in a Toyota van and a Chevrolet Express van, the latter of which was used as a stunt in which the van was radio-control driven off a dirt jump and directly into the side of a house:
This video was enough to get Wengen back into the spotlight, garnering over 3.5 million views on TikTok after just a few weeks. But how I came across him was through a different video, which has amassed over 200,000 views on its own. It shows the system installed into a Nissan Altima that Wenger found on Facebook Marketplace, followed by a short clip of him piloting the car, via the remote, through an open field.
While it’s not as spectacular as the van going through the house, it’s still fascinating to watch. There definitely isn’t anyone behind the wheel, yet the car is accelerating, turning, and braking. The car isn’t very quick, and we only get a few seconds of footage, most of which shows the car veering off the road. But it works!
@clee.wenremote control nissan altima♬ original sound – Clee Wen
“Right now, it’s working phenomenally,” Wenger told me. “I have used it over the [Spring] quite a bit already, and I have another video planned for it.”
So What’s Next?
Wenger tells me he’s developing a new remote control that’ll involve a touchscreen. He also wants to figure out how to install a module for selecting gears.
“I don’t have the shifter added yet, but I’m working on that,” he said. “You can’t just get in reverse. “At this point, I have to stop it and go and put it in forward or reverse.”
Other than that, Wenger plans to continue using the RC-car-on-demand system for backyard antics with his friends, filming stuff in the hopes that something goes viral. Before you go messaging him, asking him to build a system for your own junker, he told me that he’d only build another under pretty specific circumstances to limit his own liability, which is probably the smart move.
“It’d probably depend on what they’d want to do with it,” Wenger said. “I can build something like that for myself, but if I build something, give it to someone, and they end up hurting somebody through it, that becomes a problem. Because of liability, I can’t just sell [the system.]”
That being said, there are instances where Wenger might be open to a collaboration, where, if another YouTuber or similar online presence comes to him with an idea involving an RC car, he’d participate in making that happen. Either way, don’t expect to see a full-size RC car out on the road any time soon.
“At this point, I use it in an area where if it does get [out of control,] it’ll go in the woods or get hung up on a dirt bank,” he told me. “I just did it for myself to make my videos and stuff.”
Wenger is exactly the type of enthusiast we need more of in this world. Someone who just wants to have fun and problem-solves for the heck of it, catching it all on camera for the joy of others. Something tells me that the Altima won’t be the last car we see this system in. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Top graphic images: Cleon Wenger
we never really grow, we are just big kids
Great encompassing the story I have seen this done many times
The article makes it sound like he is assembling houses underwater – “When he’s not helping to assemble houses off the coast of Seneca Lake”
“Off the coast” refers to a location in the water (ocean or sea) near the land, rather than on the shore itself. It indicates proximity to a coastline, typically used to describe where ships, islands, or marine life are positioned relative to the land, such as “a ship anchored off the coast”.
I think the editor made some mistakes a little i work for a shop that makes custom stairs and custom doors and lots of the houses are along the lakes
Apologies for being the grammar police! I must say I enjoyed watching the van crashing into the house very much, well done!
That RC 1982 Camry with the Knight Rider theme was a staple of early 2000s internet. La plus ca change.
+1 came here for this
Yeah that RC Camry is a fucking legend
Full size RC cars were a staple of a certain genre of TV in the early 2000s
I cannot hear the phrase “variable reluctance” without immediately thinking of the Turbo Encabulator
“variable reluctance”
A measure of sobriety, right?
Funny, the way most of them are driven, I thought they were RC cars already!
Building the transmitter and receiver from scratch seems unnecessary with all the available RC products on the market.
I wanted to use arduinos because i wanted to learn how use those
Arduinos rock. We use them to control many parts of a telescope. We also use a stepper (for focus). =)
cool i would like to get into ostronomy more do you have a youtube channel
No, but look up Manastash Ridge Observatory. All our code is in Github, and feel free to reach out via my email (you can find it)
This reminds me of last year when SuperFastMatt did this with his Smart Car. I think he spent a bit more than this, but the steering setup looked similar.
I would say that this explains the Altima I encountered on my way to work this morning, but we all know that’s not really the reason why it was straddling the double line at 6am.
I salute anyone who renders a Nissan Altima harmless to the rest of society.
The Altima was the right platform for this. No one will suspect a thing if the driving is erratic.
I appreciate that he’s testing the driver-less car in a field in the woods, and not, you know, on the streets where I live. We need more of THAT type of enthusiast.