Worrying: Tesla's robotaxi crashed 14 times in 8 months
What's the story
Tesla's autonomous driving cabs, dubbed "Robotaxi," has been involved in five new crashes in Austin, Texas. The incidents occurred between December 2025 and January 2026, taking the total number of accidents since the service began in June 2025 to a staggering 14. The latest data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows that these incidents are four times more frequent than those involving human drivers.
Incident specifics
Details of the latest crashes
The recent crashes involved Tesla Model Y vehicles with the "verified engaged" autonomous driving system in Austin. They included a crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary, a collision with a heavy truck at 6.44km/h, and two separate cases of backing into objects. In one case, it was a pole or tree at 1.61km/h and in another case, it was a fixed object at 3.22km/h.
Reporting concerns
Incident narratives redacted
Notably, all five new incident narratives have been redacted as "confidential business information." This is a practice that has drawn criticism from other companies in the automated driving systems (ADS) space. Waymo, Zoox and others offer full narrative descriptions of their incidents. The redaction by Tesla has raised questions about transparency and accountability in its crash reporting practices.
Safety concerns
Crash rate continues to deteriorate
Tesla's robotaxi crash rate in Austin continues to deteriorate. Extrapolating from Tesla's Q4 2025 earnings mileage data, which showed roughly 112,65,40 cumulative paid kilometers through November, the fleet likely reached around 128,74,75km by mid-January 2026. That works out to one crash every 91,732km. By its own standards of safety data indicating a typical human driver has a minor collision every 368,539km whether or not they're at fault, Tesla's "Robotaxi" fleet is crashing nearly 4x more often than a normal driver.