Tesla 'Robotaxi' Adds 5 More Crashes in Austin in a Month
upstart writes:
Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month:
Tesla has reported five new crashes involving its "Robotaxi" fleet in Austin, Texas, bringing the total to 14 incidents since the service launched in June 2025. The newly filed NHTSA data also reveals that Tesla quietly upgraded one earlier crash to include a hospitalization injury, something the company never disclosed publicly.
The new data comes from the latest update to NHTSA's Standing General Order (SGO) incident report database for automated driving systems (ADS). We have been tracking Tesla's Robotaxi crash data closely, and the trend is not improving.
Tesla submitted five new crash reports in January 2026, covering incidents from December 2025 and January 2026. All five involved Model Y vehicles operating with the autonomous driving system "verified engaged" in Austin.
The new crashes include a collision with a fixed object at 17 mph while the vehicle was driving straight, a crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary, a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph, and two separate incidents where the Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph.
As with every previous Tesla crash in the database, all five new incident narratives are fully redacted as "confidential business information." Tesla remains the only ADS operator to systematically hide crash details from the public through NHTSA's confidentiality provisions. Waymo, Zoox, and every other company in the database provide full narrative descriptions of their incidents.
Buried in the updated data is a revised report for a July 2025 crash (Report ID 13781-11375) that Tesla originally filed as "property damage only." In December 2025, Tesla submitted a third version of that report upgrading the injury severity to "Minor W/ Hospitalization."
This means someone involved in a Tesla "Robotaxi" crash required hospital treatment. The original crash involved a right turn collision with an SUV at 2 mph. Tesla's delayed admission of hospitalization, five months after the incident, raises more questions about its crash reporting, which is already heavily redacted.
With 14 crashes now on the books, Tesla's "Robotaxi" crash rate in Austin continues to deteriorate. Extrapolating from Tesla's Q4 2025 earnings mileage data, which showed roughly 700,000 cumulative paid miles through November, the fleet likely reached around 800,000 miles by mid-January 2026. That works out to one crash every 57,000 miles.
The irony is that Tesla's own numbers condemn it. Tesla's Vehicle Safety Report claims the average American driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles and a major collision every 699,000 miles. By Tesla's own benchmark, its "Robotaxi" fleet is crashing nearly 4 times more often than what the company says is normal for a regular human driver in a minor collision, and virtually every single one of these miles was driven with a trained safety monitor in the vehicle who could intervene at any moment, which means they likely prevented more crashes that Tesla's system wouldn't have avoided.
Using NHTSA's broader police-reported crash average of roughly one per 500,000 miles, the picture is even worse, Tesla's fleet is crashing at approximately 8 times the human rate.
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