Tesla reveals new details about Robotaxi crashes and the humans involved

For more than For a year, Tesla hid details about its robotaxi accidents from public view. Now, the company has published new details in a federal database about 17 incidents, which occurred between July 2025 and March 2026. In at least two of them, Tesla human employees appear to have played a role in these incidents by driving the self-driving cars remotely into objects on the street.

In both crashes, which occurred in Austin, there were “safety monitors” in the passenger seats of the vehicles to oversee still-nascent self-driving technology, and there were no passengers in the cars. Both accidents occurred at speeds of less than 10 miles per hour. The new details were first reported by TechCrunch.

In one incident in July 2025, a safety observer suffered “minor” injuries after a remote worker drove a Tesla up a curb and hit a metal fence at 8 mph. The observer, who requested assistance from Tesla’s remote driving team after the car stopped on the side of the street and would not move forward, was not hospitalized, Tesla said.

The other accident, in January 2026, occurred after the safety controller requested navigation assistance from the remote team. The remote driver took control and drove the car straight into a temporary construction barrier at 9 mph. The accident caused the robotaxi’s left front fender and tire to be crushed, but Tesla did not report any injuries.

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

The new details draw attention to an often misunderstood but safety-critical part of autonomous vehicle operations: human assistants who monitor automated cars remotely and intervene when they encounter a problem. All U.S. self-driving car operators maintain these remote teams, according to letters submitted to a U.S. senator earlier this year. But Tesla appears to be an anomaly because it often allows these remote workers to drive cars directly.

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

Safety advocates have raised questions about remote driving, which can be difficult in places without stable cellular connectivity and in contexts where remote drivers need a perfect understanding of the car’s surroundings to guide it out of complex situations.

The new details about the two Tesla incidents “raise questions about what a remote operator can see in both coverage and accuracy, and what kind of latency they experience while driving,” Noah Goodall, an independent researcher on autonomous vehicles, told WIRED in a letter.

Tesla’s still-nascent robotaxi service operates in three Texas cities: Austin, Dallas, and Houston. But the service has fewer than 100 vehicles in operation in total, compared with about 4,000 at Waymo. It appears that less than half of Tesla vehicles operate without a safety screen in the passenger seat. Wait times for service in Houston and Dallas, where robotaxis launched in April, are more than 35 minutes, Reuters reported this week. Even in Austin, where cars have been carrying passengers for about a year, a reporter for the publication found that robo-taxis were sometimes completely unavailable.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said self-driving cars and robotics are the automaker’s focus rather than manufacturing electric cars. Musk’s compensation — a potential $1 trillion salary by 2035 — is now tied to the vehicle and Robotic deliveries, as well as sales of yet-to-be-released self-driving subscriptions and the number of robotaxis in commercial operation.