Electric Scooter Accident Report 2025

Convenience comes at a cost that is not always clear from a product’s sales tag.

With cars and planes, a large part of that cost is the environmental toll the vehicles continue to take. But in the case of electric scooters — which have the potential to reduce transport’s toll on the environment — the cost is felt through an alarming growth in road injuries.

One study from UCLA found that the annual cost of e-scooter and bicycle hospitalizations rose nearly five times over between 2016 and 2024, as micromobility entered the mainstream. It also found that e-scooter injuries are more likely to involve bone fractures, paralysis or major surgery than bike injuries, and are more likely to happen to the young.

And yet, there is evidence that much of this danger is avoidable. Other studies have shown that e-scooter riders are less likely to wear helmets and more likely to drink alcohol before driving, compared to other traditional and modern forms of micromobility. These are simple safety warnings to heed, and they are the norm for other forms of motorized transportation.

To draw attention to the dangers that come with the pleasure and convenience of e-scooter use, ERideHero analyzed the latest available figures on electric scooter injuries in the U.S. and identified the trends these injuries are following.

What We Did

We sourced electric scooter injury data from the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission's NEISS Database, which collects data on consumer product-related injuries from a sample of over 100 American ER departments. The database provides weighting scores for each injury entry, which allowed us to extrapolate estimates for the whole of the U.S. We sourced the global data on electric scooter road accidents manually from reputable news sources.

Key Findings

• The number of under-15s injured by electric scooters more than doubled to 17,641 in 2024.
• The age group that suffers the most electronic scooter injuries is 15-24 year olds (23.24%).
• 20,960 or 18.42% of all electronic scooter injuries in 2024 were head injuries.
• Some 67.70% of electric scooter injuries in 2024 happened to males.
• New Zealand had 654 electric scooter road accidents per million people in 2024 — in the U.S., the figure was 20 per million.

E-scooter Injuries Rose by 80% Last Year

First, we looked at the rise in the total number of U.S. e-scooter injuries over the past five years. Overall, the figure has risen 3.94 times from 29,344 in 2020 to 115,713 in 2024. The decade began with a 74% rise in injuries between 2020 and 2021, as ride shares emerged from a COVID-19 slump and the total number of shared micromobility trips since 2010 passed half a billion.

“Well-designed micromobility programs mean safer, more sustainable and resilient cities,” said Corinne Kisner, Executive Director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) at the time. “By redesigning streets, lowering speeds, and prioritizing bikeway projects, local leaders can ensure that the bike and scooter boom continues to gain momentum, connecting people to the opportunities in their cities.”

However, while injury numbers rose by just 12% in each of the following two years, there was a shock around the corner. Between 2023 and 2024, the number of electric scooter injuries rose by 80% from 64,312 to 115,713. And recent research suggests that it is not that electric scooters are intrinsically dangerous, but that it is the behavior or riding style of their users that keeps injury levels high among riders and pedestrians alike.

“Just a step or two out the doorway I walk out and just boom. I landed right on my hip, I could hear it and feel, and I thought that's bad,” pedestrian John Stamstad, victim of a hit-and-run scooter in Seattle, told King 5 News. “There was a bike lane just like, 10 feet out. I don’t think the person was malicious, but he was negligent.”

Children Are Incurring A Higher Proportion of E-scooter Injuries

Next, we looked at how different age groups are represented in the e-scooter injury statistics. We began by examining the rise in the number of children suffering such injuries.

The number of injuries among under-sixes has risen 2.39 times since 2020; 2.95 times among all under-11s; and 4.85 times among all under-15s. In the last year alone, the number of children under 15 injured rose by 116% from 8,159 to 17,641.

We also discovered a troubling trend in injuries among children. Not only is the number of children injured by e-scooters rising dramatically each year, but the proportion of injuries that happen to under-15s has also risen, compared to other age groups. In 2024, 15.26% of all U.S. e-scooter injuries happened to those who are 14 or younger, up from 12.69% in 2023 and 10.68% in 2021.

E-scooter injuries are generally weighted towards younger generations, with the 15-24 age-group incurring 23.24% of all injuries — just a few decimal points ahead of the second most affected age-group, 25-34-year-olds. The 0-14 age group incurs more injuries than any group from age 35 upwards.

The trend of young people being injured by e-scooters may be occurring as the market broadens, e-scooter use becomes ‘normal’ and cheaper or second-hand scooters become appealing gifts from parents to children.

Some parents seem to have bought their kids e-scooters without realizing that they can go from zero to 40 km/h in seconds, says Daniel Rosenfield, a pediatric emergency physician. “From an emotional and cognitive perspective — where you just have the ability to understand where your body is in space, how you can make turns, what's far ahead and what's not — [it is] similar to driving a car.”

E-scooter Users Are Statistically Most Likely to Damage Heads

One refrain that repeatedly emerges in e-scooter research is that helmets save lives. This is underlined by our own analysis, which found that 20,960, or 18.42%, of all e-scooter injuries in 2024 were head injuries — and this doesn’t include injuries to the face and sensory organs. We’ve mapped out the prevalence of injuries to each body part below: the head and joints of the extremities all commonly taking the brunt of a fall.

“Kids need to be in appropriate safety gear,” said pediatric emergency medicine physician Dr. Meghan Martin. “They should be wearing helmets, they should be wearing not flipflops or sandals but full foot sneakers, covered shoes, covered toes. They should also be in long pants, long sleeves, in case they were to crash.”

“With the introduction of e-scooters and e-bikes, we've certainly seen different types of injuries than we've seen in the past,” said Dr. Graham King, St. Joseph's Health Care London's Chief of Surgery at the Roth McFarlane Hand & Upper Limb Centre. “A lot of facial fractures from falling and hitting your face or head.

“They can also be open fractures because the force is so high. These things go up to 30 kilometres per hour or more. When they hit the ground, the bones sometimes come through the skin, and have what we call compound fractures.”

Two-thirds of E-scooter Injuries Are Incurred by Men and Boys

In 2024, just over two-thirds (67.70%) of e-scooter injuries were incurred by males. However, research has shown that while males are more likely to be involved in accidents —in part because they take more e-scooter journeys — females who ride are 1.5 times more likely to be involved in an injury crash.

Nichole Morris, director of the University of Minnesota’s HumanFIRST Laboratory, says that this female susceptibility to e-scooter injuries “may suggest a need to examine potential e-scooter design issues that may not adapt well to female riders, such as handlebar height, center of gravity, and required upper body strength.”

Over 10,000 Annual E-scooter Injuries Involve Driving Under the Influence

Of 115,713 e-scooter injuries in 2024, some 2,515 (2.17%) involved recreational drugs and 8,699 (7.52%) involved alcohol. Worryingly, a study from North Dakota State University found that, “Compared with adults under age 40, children ages 10 to 17… had 7.5 times greater odds of these emergency department visits that involved drinking.”

Other research has shown that driving while intoxicated is disproportionately likely to result in a head injury; some 68% of alcohol-related e-scooter injuries result in head trauma, compared to 28% among non-alcohol-related injuries.

Riding an e-scooter under the influence may land you with a DUI in most states, although some — such as Wisconsin — don’t count an e-scooter as a vehicle for DUI purposes.

Summer is Peak Season for E-scooter Injuries

Next, we looked at the timing of e-scooter-related injuries. The danger peaks in the summer, with 14,424 injuries occurring in July 2024. The lowest figure was in January (3,950). However, it’s worth noting that this was coming out of a year (2023-24) when injuries in general rose rapidly — we may well expect the January 2025 figure to be much higher. Indeed, December 2024 closed out at 6,266 injuries.

Furthermore, research has shown that e-scooter riders experience a greater proportion (24.2%) of all e-scooter injuries during the winter months, compared to bicycle riders (20%).

Weekends are the worst time of the week for e-scooter injuries. Some 18,851, or 16.29%, of all e-scooter injuries in 2024 occurred on a Saturday. Sunday (17,499 or 15.12%) was the second most likely day to get hurt.

Fridays and Tuesdays also stand out as high-impact days, although there is less than a 1.5% difference between the best and worst weekdays for injuries. In fact, U.S. e-scooter injuries are far more evenly spread throughout the week and weekend than elsewhere. At least two studies in separate German cities found that more than half of local e-scooter injuries occurred on weekends, with one study concluding that this pattern indicates the dangers of leisure-oriented use.

New Zealand Has Densest Cluster of E-Scooter Road Accidents

Finally, we appraised the frequency of electric scooter-related road accidents per capita in every country.

The U.S. had the second most such accidents in 2025 (6,885), but such accidents are relatively infrequent compared to population size (20 e-scooter road accidents per million people). By comparison, Germany has only 8.9% more accidents in total but 350% more per capita (90 accidents per million people).

With 3,400 annual e-scooter road accidents among its population of 5.2 million people, New Zealand suffers the highest density of such events: 654 per million people. Unlike many other places in the world, in New Zealand it is permitted to ride an e-scooter on the road or on the sidewalk. Evidence is mounting that the prevalence of e-scooters on the streets discourages pedestrians from leaving their homes for fear of getting hurt, with advocacy group Blind Citizens NZ claiming that speed restrictions and other controls are not currently working.

“There’s no question that e-scooters are convenient, fun, and get you places faster,” said engineering firm WSP’s research manager, Louise Malcolm. “But they’re also five times more likely than cycling to cause death or serious injury. That’s why it’s so important we get the safety settings right.”

Micromobility Should Be Convenient, Not Casual

There is no doubt that shared and electric micromobility options like e-scooters can be convenient and fun, improving accessibility and potentially reducing some areas of ecological wear and tear (production and disposal footprints notwithstanding).

However, as the technology has been rolled out — often in a landgrab scenario as brands tried to conquer the market — safety legislation and user sophistication have lagged behind.

For example, it is not currently the norm to wear a helmet or take training before riding an e-scooter. With a slower or more controlled introduction, these cultural patterns might have been shaped very differently. Research has found that although “reducing the collision speed from 25 km/h to 15 km/h can decrease the risk of head injuries to pedestrians by up to 49 percent,” riders tend to default to the top available speed.

As such, when starting out with electric scooters, riders should follow these safety tips:

The streets are a communal space, and the way you ride influences both the safety of others and the example you set for new electric scooter riders.

Methodology & Sources

We sourced electric scooter injury data from the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission's NEISS Database, which collects data on consumer product-related injuries from a sample of over 100 ER departments in the U.S. The database provides weighting scores for each injury entry, enabling us to extrapolate the figures to represent estimates for the entire U.S. We sourced the global data on electric scooter road accidents manually from reputable news sources in each country.

Data is correct as of July 2025.