The first RC cars: four accounts, and no settled answer.

Ask who made the first radio-controlled car and you will get several answers, each from a different kind of source: a reference work, a maker's blog, a private historian, a collectors' website, a forum thread and Wikipedia. None of them rests on a primary document that could be read for this site. So this page does not pick a winner. It sets out what each source says and what that claim stands on.

Before the 1960s

Wikipedia says radio-controlled cars have existed since the 1940s, but it names no first car. It also records that a streamlined radio-controlled vehicle took third prize in Ford Motor Company's 1954 Industrial Arts Awards, and that Ford's designers fitted radio control to scale styling models, the LaTosca and the Mexico (a reworked 1955 Thunderbird), using 6-volt car batteries and the motors that worked convertible tops. Wikipedia credits this to a Hemmings report that could not be read, so it is unconfirmed beyond Wikipedia.

David Palmeter, a private historian who works from contemporary magazines, says he has found no documentation of radio-controlled model cars in the 1930s or 1940s, even though radio-controlled model aircraft were flown and written about in the 1930s.

Hobbyist builds of the 1960s

An EBSCO Research Starter (Michah Issit, 2022) says model car enthusiasts made the first radio-controlled automobiles in the early 1960s by adapting model aeroplane engines. It says independent hobbyists built every RC car until toy companies entered the market in the late 1960s, and that most of those first cars were 1:8 scale. This is one reference work, and no second source was found for the detail.

A 2012 post on the blog of Axial, a manufacturer, calls Norbert Meyer of Southern California the "Father of R/C Racing" and says he and his neighbour Bob Blair built the first two RC cars in the mid to late 1960s. The same post says Meyer and George Siposs started RA/CAR in 1968, which it calls the first RC manufacturing company, and that the earliest racing cars were built entirely by hand. These are a maker's claims and no independent source confirms them.

Palmeter's account adds that the March 1966 issue of Radio Control Modeler carried a cover story by Chuck Waas on his own radio conversion of a Wen-Mac Mustang, made before Testors' production model, and that Wen-Mac's own 1965 Mustang conversion offer used a throttle worked through a control line rather than by radio. Those details rest on Palmeter's reading of the magazines; the magazines themselves were not read for this site.

The first commercially sold RC car: four versions

This is the main disagreement. Four companies, in Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, are each named by some source as first.

Palmeter, writing about how the Wikipedia article changed, calls the El-Gi version close to the truth but says the facts are complicated. That is one historian's view, not a ruling.

The Testors Mustang in more detail

Palmeter's account gives the most detail of any version. By his reading, the 1966 announcement described electric motors, rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries, a three-channel transmitter and three 27 MHz channels so that three cars could run at once. Car Model announced the production ready-to-run car in April 1966. When Model Car Science reported on it in February 1967 it described the steering as fully proportional and gave the scale as 1/11, not the 1:9 announced. A Car Model show report from April 1967 said early production had problems and very few cars were delivered. Palmeter also says Testors bought Wen-Mac in 1966. All of this is unconfirmed beyond his site.

Mardave and the American makers

Collectors Weekly dates Mardave's first nitro or gas-powered RC cars to the early 1970s, around the same time as the American makers Associated Electrics, Thorp, Dynamic, Taurus, Delta and Scorpion. It gives no exact year for Mardave, and none was found elsewhere. The EBSCO Research Starter says some companies began making electric-powered cars in the early 1970s.

Why nothing is settled

• No primary document was read for any version: not the June 1966 Quattroruote, not RE-EL's own site, not the 1966 and 1967 Car Model and Model Car Science issues, and not the Hemmings report on Ford's styling models.
• The versions answer different questions. A one-off conversion, a styling model, a trade-show announcement and a car on sale in shops can each be called "first".
• No historian or museum source found for this site settles which of El-Gi, RE-EL, Mardave and Testors came first.

Tamiya's first RC car, 1976

Tamiya, the maker, says its RC car line began in 1976 with the Porsche 934. It said so on the page for a 50th-anniversary 1/10 kit, dated 6 April 2026, with release set for 23 May 2026.

LiveRC (Mike Garrison, 27 June 2019) says Tamiya released the 1/12 Porsche 934 Turbo in November 1976, as a kit with body, motor, rubber tyres, spring suspension and a rear differential, but no radio or servos. No other source for the month was read, so the month rests on LiveRC alone.

Motor Sport magazine's July 2017 article, whose history section was written by Marcus Nicholls, editor of Tamiya Model Magazine, says the RC Porsche 934 was a radio-controlled version of Tamiya's 1:12 static kit. It first ran on ordinary dry cells that lasted about ten minutes, and Tamiya then developed rechargeable nickel-cadmium packs that became an industry standard for many years. The article gives no year for the packs. The story of those batteries continues on motors and batteries history.

Wikipedia says competitive RC car racing surged in popularity in the 1980s while Shunsaku Tamiya led the company. How organised racing began, which was earlier than that, is on early racing and ROAR, and the off-road cars that followed the Porsche are on off-road arrives.