Injury data, source by source, and what it cannot show.

How to read this page

• Every figure keeps its source. Each number is given with its publisher, data system, years and population. Figures from different sources are never added, averaged or compared as if they measured the same thing.
• None of it is RC-car racing data. No study measuring injuries in RC car racing was found, and none of the categories in the data below is specific to RC cars.
• Emergency-department estimates are not risk. They estimate how many people arrived at hospital emergency departments, not how likely anyone is to be hurt.

CPSC toy reports: one category for every toy vehicle

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) publishes staff reports on toy-related injuries using its National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), which produces national estimates of injuries treated in hospital emergency departments. NEISS has no product code for RC cars. They fall within code 5021, "Toy Vehicles (Excluding Riding Toys)", which covers every kind of non-riding toy vehicle, as the appendices to the 2014 and 2023 reports list it. Any figure for that code includes RC cars along with all the other toy vehicles in it, and cannot be read as an RC figure.

Calendar year 2023

The CPSC staff report "Toy-Related Deaths and Injuries, Calendar Year 2023" (Directorate for Epidemiology, November 2024) is marked as prepared by staff, not reviewed or approved by the Commission, and cleared for public release. It estimated 231,700 toy-related injuries of all ages treated in US emergency departments in 2023, 57 percent of them to males. For the toy-vehicle category it gave these estimates:

The CPSC says that although a toy was associated with these incidents, it was not necessarily the cause of the injury or death.

Calendar year 2014

The earlier CPSC staff report for calendar year 2014 (data extracted July 2015) estimated 13,400 emergency-department-treated injuries associated with toy vehicles in 2014 for all ages (5 percent of toy injuries), 9,600 among children under 15 and 6,500 among children under 5.

Why the two years are not a trend

The 2014 and 2023 reports use different age bands: under 15 and under 5 in 2014, against 14 or younger and 4 or younger in 2023. They are separate estimates from separate reports, and the CPSC's own trend analysis was not part of what was read, so this site does not present the change from one year to the other as a rise or fall. A CPSC report for calendar year 2024, listed on the CPSC's toys page as dated 20 April 2026 according to a search summary, was not read; the 2023 report is the latest figure here.

Swallowed model-engine fuel: case reports

Several medical case reports describe people who swallowed model-engine fuel. They are single cases or small series, and they say nothing about how often such poisonings happen.

• BMJ Case Reports, 2017 (Powell, Hassall, Scholes and Al-Jubouri): a 61-year-old woman accidentally swallowed one to two mouthfuls of a fuel the authors describe as used for model cars and aircraft. The authors state that such fuels contain nitromethane and synthetic oils and may contain methanol; these are the authors' statements, not a rule-book specification. They report that nitromethane falsely raised one laboratory measure of kidney function, and warn that methanol poisoning remains possible after swallowing such fuel.
• NDT Plus, 2007 (Patel, Dikkala and Marcus): a 38-year-old woman swallowed synthetic model engine fuel containing methanol and nitromethane. The authors' point is that nitromethane can make a common kidney test read falsely high, while methanol toxicity is the greater concern.
• Emergency Medicine, September 2017 (Mudan and Nelson): a 20-month-old boy sipped a model race car fuel additive from a bottle kept in a garage; the bottle listed nitromethane, castor oil and methanol, and repeat testing found no methanol. The article says nitromethane is commonly added, with methanol and castor oil, to fuel for drag racers, radio-controlled cars and model aircraft.
• Two further papers, not read. Search summaries describe a two-year chart review by Padmanabhan and colleagues (2011) of seven children aged 19 months to 3 years who swallowed nitromethane and methanol model fuel, and a 1998 report of two patients by Mullins and Hammett-Stabler. Neither paper was read, so their findings are unconfirmed.

What NIOSH and the HSE publish about methanol and nitromethane themselves is on fuel hazards.

Lithium-battery burns: a study with no RC cases

A review by Diab, O'Hara, Fisher and colleagues (Australasian Journal of Plastic Surgery, 2021) looked at lithium-battery burns recorded in the New South Wales Statewide Burn Injury Service database and three burn units from January 2005 to December 2019. It found 24 patients, 6 children and 18 adults aged 1 to 58. The devices were phone batteries, portable charging batteries and e-cigarettes; no RC, hobby or model battery is recorded, so the study gives no RC figure. Flame burns were the most common type (15 of 24), and three-quarters of cases happened at home. The paper is inconsistent with itself: its text and Table 2 give opposite counts for full-thickness and superficial burns, and its Table 1 device counts (12 phone, 7 battery, 5 e-cigarette) differ from those in its text (11, 10 and 3).

Injuries recorded in RC recall notices

CPSC recall notices record the incidents reported for one product. They are not rates, but they are the only injury records tied to RC vehicles or their chargers that the research found from a regulator:

More on each notice is on recalls.

Other RC models

The only RC injury case report found involves a helicopter, not a car: a Hong Kong Medical Journal report (Lee and colleagues, 2009), seen only as a search summary, describes an eye injury causing permanent blindness when a toy RC helicopter's rotor blades came loose after a shaft broke, and notes that the kit instructions did not warn of eye injury.

What was looked for and not found

No injury study or surveillance figure specific to RC cars or RC car racing, no case report of an RC-car burn, eye or impact injury, and no study of RC lithium-polymer battery burns was found. Not found is not the same as not existing.