Tesla’s Robotaxi Crashes Four Times In a Single Month

According to updated filings from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration spotted by Electrek, Tesla has reported three more crashes involving its Robotaxis operating in Austin, Texas, bringing it to a total of seven known crashes since the service first launched in late June. Four of those happened in September, and all in just the first week — suggesting there may be yet more incidents for us to hear about, whenever Tesla gets around to reporting them. In any case, it’s an embarrassing number of crashes to have when you consider the automaker’s fleet is limited to just 30 to 40 vehicles, which are geofenced to a relatively small area of the city.

So 2x the crashes of Waymo despite the combo of Tesla self driving and a safety driver?

So, in all fairness we need to have both the number of crashes, severity of crashes, and total miles driven to determine how safe/unsafe this is. OH wait, Tesla redacted all that information so the public is stuck in a "Trust me Bro" situation . . . GO TO HELL ELON! We deserve this information if you are deploying your cars on public streets.

I'll never believe that safety drivers are effective. Imagine sitting on an autonomous car and your job is just looking out the window and avoid incidents. Mindbogglingly boring. My attention would wane in no time.... Maybe it's just me and some folks can do this really well....

"See all that stuff on there Elon (pointing at Waymo)? That's why your cars never worked"

The safety drivers are only there if the car gets confused and stops.  They aren’t there to take the wheel quickly, even if advertised that way.

Hopefully nobody got hurt but I’m sure there’s more lawsuits coming ! The cost of the payouts from the lawsuits will probably be a year or two’s profit in 2038 when they might be making money

That's why self driving cars have to be totally hands free. Humans are not good at paying attention to tasks that require no input for most of the time.

well they're in the driver seat now mostly. Pedal should be inches away.

And remember, THIS IS WITH A HUMAN SUPERVISOR TRYING TO PREVENT CRASHES!!! That's the really wild thing ...these are all fake Robotaxis.

Agreed we *should* have that but that's what you get with weak government policy. A company won't willingly disclose information that will hurt it if it doesn't have to. Saying please to Elon is a bad strategy.

It's probably worse than that since that was based on 4 crashed in 250,000 miles. These 3 crashes are all in the same timeline as previous crashes (not newer) so it should be 7 in 250,000 miles. SO closer to 4x worse now.

Below are the meaningful excerpts of the seven Tesla collisions reported in the NHTSA ADS data (CSV format) through October 15, 2025. Two of the collisions seem to be from the Tesla being rear-ended by SUVs (see contact areas below), one seems to be a non-motorist cyclist hitting the right side of a Tesla while it was stopped (0 mph), and one was with a car backing up in an intersection while the Tesla was slowly (6 mph) moving forward. Those circumstances don't point to clear fault, but suggest at least some fault of the other party is likely. Two collisions were with fixed objects, including one on a street which is the only collision that resulted in an injury ("minor w/o hospitalization"). Another was in a parking lot, and while Tesla redacts the accident narratives from publication, Waymo fixed-object parking lot collisions are often with chains or raising/lowering arm barriers...on the other hand I saw a vid of a Tesla Robotaxi colliding with a curb in a parking lot. Hitting fixed objects suggest at least some fault of the Tesla. One collision where the data seems misreported is report ID 13781-11787, the top one listed below, which was a collision with an animal crossing a roadway at an intersection that contacted the front left of the Tesla. The Tesla was reportedly stopped traveling at 27 mph prior to impact, which makes me think "stopped" is incorrect. All the collisions occurred in Austin, all were in clear or partly cloudy weather, and only report 13781-11507 had any unusual road conditions (it was a work zone). Of passing interest, one of the vehicles has been in two collisions...the Tesla with 7SAYGDEE3TA in the VIN may be cursed!

Dude Tesla $tsla is cooked , Trump in done . ELON will never see another government contract and move to Argentina

There are only like 10 Robotaxis operating only under certain conditions (must be daylight hours, can't be raining, etc...) Let's say they have accrued 100k miles in that time. 7 accidents like this is an astonishingly bad rate. Some of these accidents appear to be not the Tesla's fault, but are they really? How often do you have people hitting the side of your car or rear ending you? I think if we use some reading between the lines, we could probably assume that almost all of these, if not all of these crashes, have at least some or maybe most of the liability on Tesla's side. And the worst part about this is that this is WITH safety drivers in the car. Let's say the safety drivers prevent 80% of accidents... that accident rate is absolute insanity and lines up with my own experience with FSD.

that's pretty much my beef with all of the driving assist/fUlL sElF DrIvInG systems one of the reasons I prefer manual over automatic transmissions is it helps keep my brain engaged while I'm driving having nothing to do but having to pay just as close attention as if you were just sounds like the worst of all worlds to me - if I can't be sitting in the back with a steam deck, I'd rather just drive

So I guess in hindsight the penis shaped geofence was a bit cocky.

> when you consider the automaker’s fleet is limited to just 30 to 40 vehicles Do you have a source for this? I remember when they launched it said 10-20 vehicles and I never saw them announce a larger fleet

Elon gonna make sure those NDA’s the driver supervisors sign are watertight lol

Rear ending is an interesting one because it's usually possible to blame the other party, but you can also reduce the risk to yourself by anticipating hazards and driving in a more predictable manner.

With Tesla's new (available since 2021) and amazing feature the phantom braking. Rear ends are a lot likelier.

And this is with a safety monitor, and they've prevented multiple accidents

Exactly, or you can cause it by braking hard for no reason. My mom loved doing that and has been rear ended 4 times. All were legally not her fault, but all of them were definitely her fault. For example, one time she was heading down a hill and made a right turn onto an empty road but didn't see the 'yield' sign until she was like 30 feet from it. She panic stopped and the person behind her rear ended her. Having experienced FSD, I can tell you that phantom braking is a HUGE thing. So like even for the cyclist, if the car was driving at a constant speed through an intersection or something, and then suddenly slammed on the brakes for no reason, I could see how that could cause a T-bone. I've never been rear ended in probably \~500k miles of driving. And I don't stop driving when the sun isn't out or it starts raining lol

If safety drivers even prevent 1/2 of all accidents, that's going to double the crash rate... If they prevent 90% of crashes, then it's 10X the crash rate...

If the fleet cracked 100 cars, you'd hear about it. They increase the area without increasing the number of vehicles which limits the risk since at this skill level, they'll maim or kill someone someone soon enough.

These crashes are from September though, I don't think they had racked up 250k miles yet. Also, they don't specify (on the last conference call when they said they had 1M miles) whether those are San Francisco or Austin miles, or what the breakdown is. If we do the math on 15 Robotaxis in 4 months of driving hitting 1M miles, that comes out to an insane number of miles that is very unlikely to be real. This leads me to believe they're counting significant miles with no passengers, or maybe they're racking up testing miles or something like that and counting them towards the 1M miles. They might be running cars on like a 100 mile loop in California for employees only 2x per day or something and counting that. The miles and the reported Austin Robotaxis simply don't add up. They would have to be driving something like 500 miles a day with passengers, only during daylight hours, but they're doing it on side roads only (at the time of the earnings call), so the cars literally could not drive that fast to rack those miles up. I'd love to see a realistic assessment on what those reported miles actually are.

Stock is up. Backwards ass stock

My Chevy Volt was rear ended while I was trying to make a left into a plaza to get pizza. Totalled. Sun was in driver's eyes, and she didn't see me until it was too late. My Saab was rear ended. I was at the bottom of a turn that ended at a 2 lane road. I was waiting for traffic to clear and moving into first gear (manual) when I got hit by someone looking left (where the traffic would be coming) instead of forward. The car was only 3 days old, >11k in damage. I think it was my VW that got rear ended. We were going to church and stopped at a stop light. The person behind us didn't see us even though we were at a light with clear everything. That one wasn't too bad. You're lucky.

I feel like you're just unlucky... I don't think getting rear ended (truly no fault) is very common... I'm not saying it doesn't happen but so many times for Tesla in 250k miles seems very high...

Takeaway: Even safety drivers cannot predict when FSD goes nuts lol Elon needs to hire experienced beta testers to supervise this shit

It was literally the dick area for Tesla's fake robotaxi to fuck around. Feel sorry for locals living there ! Be safe

They have more crashes in Austin than Waymo and they: - have only a few dozen vehicles - have been there for only a few months - have safety monitors - are way less transparent than Waymo is about accidents How tf is this legal

I'm not saying I know the actual number, but the 62,500 per incident in the article is from 4 incidents in 250 k. I agree that 1 million miles is not possible from their Austin test. It probably includes their SF taxi service.

The safety drivers are quite literally mimicking Homer Simpson's job - where he sits bored all day long watching a control board at the nuclear power plant, and predictably does not notice when things go horribly wrong.

tsla is not cooked any more than gme is cooked. It's basically a meme stock. People buy the stock not because they're fools and fall for the promises but because they think there's more fools out there that will. it's the Greater Fool theory of investing That being said, they're also critical to the US's geopolitical strategy to compete with China on EVs and batteries (obviously not winning right now lol) and they have a mind-boggling number of gov't subsidies: https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc

The article addresses all of that and even napkin calculates/compares the crash rate with Waymo The crashes: > One of the latest reported crashes was with an animal, according to the document. Video has shown how in the past, Tesla’s driving software plowed through a deer in the middle of the road and made no attempt to slow down. The other two resulted in property damage: a Robotaxi collided with a bicyclist in one incident, and hit a car in the other. No injuries were reported in any of the collisions. Before these crashes, Tesla's accident rate was already nearly twice that of Waymos > the automaker’s fleet is limited to just 30 to 40 vehicles, which are geofenced to a relatively small area of a single city. Electrek calculated that Tesla’s crash rate, as of last month, was about once every 62,500 miles, which is nearly double that of its competitor Waymo. Also keep in mind this is *with* safety monitors and these 4 crashes are all just in the first week of Sept. We might have more Sept data coming in

>How tf is this legal Elon realized you can basically do anything without consequences if you're rich.

I though of him as I wrote the comment 😁

Four times so far

They're instructed to keep their finger on a makeshift emergency stop button (i.e. the open door button) at all times, and I would assume are supposed to stop whenever they sense a safety issue, not just when the car gets confused or is already stopped.

Guess waymo is having all their crashes in cali? They have reported 1331 in the last 12 months.

7 incidents, 1 with an injury w/o hospitalization, 250,000+ miles. Number of NHTSA reportable incidents and hospitalizations/fatalities are not redacted; narratives of incidents are. Mileage isn't tracked by the NHTSA, but Tesla said in their October 22 [Q3 Earnings Call](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/earnings/TSLA-Q3-2025-earnings_call-366307.html) that "We continue to operate our \[Robotaxi\] fleet in Austin without anyone in the driver's seat, and we have covered more than a quarter million miles with that." I'd say the total number of miles driven is not enough to have a good idea of how safe/unsafe the vehicle is. The more miles the better, but for good fatality rate comparisons it should probably be several hundred million miles. (Hopefully...if a service were killing people every million miles, public testing would be shut down).

Stock up 4% tomorrow

It's classic Elon style.  All promise, no substance. Only elons fans are tricked

I'd almost guarantee you the one with the bicycle was Tesla's fault. The one time I hit a car while cycling it was right in the driver's door, because the idiot pulled out of a parking lot and stopped without ever looking to see if there was anyone in the bike lane (I almost got stopped, but not quite). Which is just the kind of thing FSD is prone to do.

At least in 2024, it was 20 incidents in Austin or 1.67 per month. Tesla has been in Austin for 5 months so 1.4 per month. So okay not more but pretty much on par despite them having a tiny fraction of the vehicle fleet that Waymo has Where did you get 1331 from? Between 2021 and 2024 there were 696 in total. Highly doubt it suddenly jumped and they have twice they're lifetime crashes in just the past 12 months

The NHTSA mandatory ADAS / ADS crash reports. Its the same place these news sites have gotten the details about the 4 tesla ones in this article

That may have 30 or 40 vehicles but they are only tabling about a dozen vehicles at any given time.

Safety monitors are probably causing the accidents

How do they define a "crash"? I'd be less worried if these cars are causing dings in carparks but anything at speed would be a instant no. Hopefully reports have to include full details with video?

Not surprised. This is how Elon works. Bribe here and bribe there, repeat until there are more fanboys than people with common sense.

You couldn't pay me to get into one of those robotaxis!

I’ll get downvoted to hell but these robo taxis are just stupid and based on the idea of not paying people. Just building systems into existing cars to help with safety would be superior and more effective.

Not a Tesla fan at all but I drive through Waymo areas. I’ve seen them dead stop in two lanes of traffic. All these driverless cars likely have accidents

Is this why Tesla stock went UP this week during a bad week for the Market, especially NASDAQ?