GoKawiilTesla 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.
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