Tesla Shares New Details on Robotaxi Crashes and Human Involvement

For over a year, Tesla kept the specifics of its robotaxi crashes out of public sight. Now, the company has released new information through a federal database about 17 incidents that occurred between July 2025 and March 2026. In at least two of these cases, Tesla’s own human employees appear to have caused the collisions by remotely driving the otherwise autonomous vehicles into street obstacles.

Both crashes took place in Austin, Texas, with safety monitors seated in the passenger seats to supervise the still-developing self-driving technology. No passengers were inside the cars at the time, and each collision happened at speeds under 10 miles per hour. TechCrunch first reported the new details.

In the first incident, from July 2025, a safety monitor suffered “minor” injuries after a remote worker drove the Tesla up a curb and into a metal fence at 8 mph. The monitor had requested assistance from Tesla’s remote driving team after the car stopped on the side of a road and refused to move forward. Tesla reported that the monitor was not hospitalized.

The second crash, in January 2026, occurred when another safety monitor asked the remote team for navigation help. The remote driver took control and drove the car directly into a temporary construction barricade at 9 mph. The collision scraped the robotaxi’s front left fender and tire, but Tesla did not report any injuries.

Tesla, which does not maintain a public relations department, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

These newly disclosed incidents highlight a often misunderstood but safety-critical element of autonomous vehicle operations: the human backstops who monitor robot cars remotely and intervene when problems arise. According to letters submitted to a U. S. senator earlier this year, all self-driving operators in the country maintain these remote teams. However, Tesla appears to be an outlier because it more frequently allows these remote workers to directly drive the cars.

Other companies typically permit their workers to provide input to the autonomous vehicle software remotely, which the system can then choose to accept or reject. (Waymo says specially-trained workers can remotely drive its cars at speeds up to 2 mph, but noted in February that it had not used that function outside of training.)

Safety advocates have raised concerns about remote driving, which can be challenging in areas without reliable cellular connectivity and in situations where remote drivers need a perfect understanding of a car’s surroundings to navigate it out of complex scenarios.

The new details on the two Tesla crashes “raise questions about what the teleoperator can see in both coverage and resolution, and what kind of latency they are experiencing while driving,” Noah Goodall, an independent self-driving vehicle researcher, tells WIRED in a message.

Tesla’s still-fledgling robotaxi service currently operates in three Texas cities: Austin, Dallas, and Houston. But the service has fewer than 100 vehicles in total, compared to Waymo’s nearly 4,000. Less than half of Tesla’s cars appear to run without a safety monitor in the passenger seat. Reuters reported this week that wait times in Houston and Dallas, where robotaxis launched in April, exceed 35 minutes. Even in Austin, where the cars have been carrying passengers for almost a year, a reporter for the publication found that robotaxis were sometimes completely unavailable.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that autonomous vehicles and robotics are the automaker’s focus, rather than manufacturing electric cars. Musk’s compensation,a potential $1 trillion paycheck by 2035,is now tied to vehicle and robot deliveries, as well as sales of not-yet-released self-driving subscriptions and the number of robotaxis in commercial operation.