Tesla reveals two Robotaxi crashes involving teleoperators
Quick Answer
Tesla's recent crash reports reveal two incidents involving its robotaxi fleet, highlighting challenges in scaling the technology.
Quick Take
The crashes were linked to teleoperators, raising concerns about safety and operational reliability as Tesla pushes forward with its autonomous vehicle ambitions.
Key Points
- Two crashes involving Tesla's robotaxi fleet were recently disclosed.
- Incidents were linked to teleoperators managing the vehicles.
- Reports raise safety concerns as Tesla scales its autonomous technology.
- The findings could impact public perception of Tesla's robotaxi service.
- Tesla continues to push forward despite operational challenges.
📖 Reader Mode
~4 min readTesla Robotaxis have crashed at least twice since July 2025 while a teleoperator was remotely driving the vehicles, according to newly unredacted information submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Both crashes happened in Austin, Texas, and occurred at low speeds. In each case, there was a safety monitor behind the wheel and no passengers were onboard.
The new information comes just a few months after Tesla told lawmakers that it allows remote operators to pilot one of the company’s vehicles as long as they stay under 10 miles per hour. “This capability enables Tesla to promptly move a vehicle that may be in a compromising position, thereby mitigating the need to wait for a first responder or Tesla field representative to manually recover the vehicle,” the company said at the time.
Tesla, like other companies working on autonomous vehicle technology, is required to submit detailed information about any crashes to the NHTSA. Unlike most of those other companies, though, Tesla had always redacted the descriptions of its crashes, claiming they were confidential business information.
It’s not clear why, but Tesla changed course this week, and the latest version of the data released by the NHTSA now provides a narrative description for all 17 crashes Tesla has recorded since last year with its nascent Robotaxi network.
In July 2025, shortly after Tesla first started operating the network in Austin, the company’s automated driving system (ADS) apparently had trouble moving forward while stopped on a street. The safety monitor requested help from Tesla’s remote assistance team, and a teleoperator “took over vehicle control and gradually increased vehicle speed and turned the Tesla ADS left toward the left side of the street.”
The teleoperator then drove “up the curb and made contact with a metal fence.”
A similar sequence played out in January 2026. The Tesla ADS was driving the vehicle straight on a street, when the safety monitor “requested support to assist with vehicle navigation.”
“The teleoperator took over vehicle control when the ADS was stopped and proceeded straight on the street. The Tesla vehicle made contact with a temporary barricade for a construction site at approximately 9MPH, scraping the front-left fender and tire,” according to the data submitted to the NHTSA.
Similar to other autonomous vehicle companies like Waymo, most of the other newly unredacted crashes involve Tesla Robotaxi vehicles being crashed into instead of causing crashes.
But at least two of them involve a Tesla Robotaxi clipping its mirrors on other vehicles. In one crash, from September 2025, the Tesla ADS was unable to avoid hitting a dog that ran into the street. (Tesla reported the dog was able to run away.)
In another September 2025 crash, a Tesla Robotaxi made an unprotected left turn into a parking lot and ran into a metal chain. (The NHTSA recently closed an investigation into the occasional tendency of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software to crash into parking lot bollards, chains, and gates. Waymo also issued a recall last year related to a similar problem.)
While other robotaxi companies like Waymo and Zoox have reported more crashes than Tesla, Elon Musk’s company is operating at a fraction of the scale. The details that were revealed this week in the newly unredacted data may help explain why Tesla is scaling up its nascent autonomous ride-hailing network so slowly. Musk himself admitted last month that “making sure things are completely safe” is the biggest limiting factor to Tesla expanding the network, saying the company is being “very cautious.”
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Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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