From what I've herd about a fail safe I would say it is definetly worth the money. A car going full throttle the other direction can COMPLETELY destroy itself. Which is not fun to go and pick up the pieces. When I got my little brother his first RC car he had just got done breaking it in and wanted to run it for a little bit but I had to go out and when I can back I found out that the batteries were bad. And so he started it up and after he got about 30 feet from him the car took off the otehr direction at full throttle and went straight into a curb. I had to replace the whole front end and the top and bottom chassis. So I can say from experience its worth the 30 bucks. I ordered fail safes for my cars and I would suggest you do the same.