For greater than a yr, Tesla has shielded particulars about its robotaxi crashes from public view. Now, the corporate has revealed new particulars in a federal database about 17 incidents, which occurred between July 2025 and March 2026. In no less than two of them, Tesla’s human workers seem to have performed a hand within the crashes by remotely driving the in any other case autonomous vehicles into objects on the road.
In each crashes, which occurred in Austin, “security displays” have been within the autos’ passenger seats to supervise the still-fledgling self-driving tech, and no passengers have been using within the vehicles. Each crashes occurred at speeds beneath 10 miles per hour. The brand new particulars have been first reported by TechCrunch.
In a single incident, which occurred in July 2025, the protection monitor skilled “minor” accidents after a distant employee drove the Tesla up a curb and right into a metallic fence at 8 mph. The monitor, who had requested assist from Tesla’s distant driving group after the automobile stopped on the facet of a avenue and wouldn’t transfer ahead, was not hospitalized, Tesla reported.
The opposite incident, in January 2026, occurred after a security monitor requested navigation assist from the distant group. The distant driver took management and drove the automobile straight into a brief development barricade at 9 mph. The crash left the robotaxi’s entrance left fender and tire scraped up, however Tesla didn’t report any accidents.
Tesla, which doesn’t have a public relations group, didn’t reply to WIRED’s request for remark.
The brand new particulars draw consideration to an usually misunderstood however safety-critical a part of autonomous car operations: the human backstops who remotely monitor the robotic vehicles and intervene after they get into hassle. All US self-driving operators preserve these distant groups, in line with letters submitted to a US senator earlier this yr. However Tesla seems to be an outlier as a result of it extra regularly permits these distant staff to immediately drive the vehicles.
Different firms usually enable their staff to remotely present enter to the autonomous car software program, which the system can select to make use of or reject. (Waymo says that specifically skilled staff can remotely drive its vehicles as much as 2 mph, however mentioned in February that it hadn’t used that performance exterior of coaching.)
Security advocates have raised questions on distant driving, which might be difficult in locations with out constant mobile connectivity and in contexts the place distant drivers want an ideal understanding of a automobile’s environment to information it out of complicated conditions.
The brand new particulars on the 2 Tesla crashes “elevate questions on what the teleoperator can see in each protection and determination, and how much latency they’re experiencing whereas driving,” Noah Goodall, an unbiased self-driving car researcher, tells WIRED in a message.
Tesla’s still-fledgling robotaxi service is working in three Texas cities: Austin, Dallas, and Houston. However the service has fewer than 100 autos working in complete, in comparison with Waymo’s practically 4,000. Lower than half of Tesla’s vehicles seem to function with no security monitor sitting within the passenger seat. Reuters reported this week that service wait occasions in Houston and Dallas, the place robotaxis launched in April, are upward of 35 minutes. Even in Austin, the place the vehicles have been carrying passengers for nearly a yr, a reporter for the publication discovered that robotaxis have been generally utterly unavailable.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has mentioned that autonomous autos and robotics are the automaker’s focus as an alternative of producing electrical vehicles. Musk’s compensation—a possible $1 trillion paycheck by 2035—is now tied to car and robotic deliveries, in addition to gross sales of not-yet-released self-driving subscriptions and the variety of robotaxis in business operation.
