Tesla’s Robotaxis, which CEO Elon Musk promised there will be millions of roaming the streets by next year, have now crashed four times in a single month.
According to updated filings from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration spotted by Electrek, Tesla has reported three more crashes involving its Robotaxis operating in Austin, Texas, bringing it to a total of seven known crashes since the service first launched in late June.
Four of those happened in September, and all in just the first week — suggesting there may be yet more incidents for us to hear about, whenever Tesla gets around to reporting them.
In any case, it’s an embarrassing number of crashes to have when you consider the automaker’s fleet is limited to just 30 to 40 vehicles, which are geofenced to a relatively small area of a single city. Electrek calculated that Tesla’s crash rate, as of last month, was about once every 62,500 miles, which is nearly double that of its competitor Waymo.
Waymo, by the way, operates over 2,500 robotaxis across several major metropolitan areas, like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Austin, combining for over 100 million fully autonomous miles.
Tesla’s Robotaxis aren’t clocking any fully autonomous miles at the moment, since all of its cars are supervised by a human “safety monitor” sitting in the driver seat or sitting shotgun. But that only makes the crashes it’s experienced so far even more embarrassing. The safety monitors can intervene and take over at any moment — and somehow the dodgy cabs are still managing to swerve their way into obstacles like giant homing missiles. (And yeah, about those safety monitors, by the way.)
One of the latest reported crashes was with an animal, according to the document. Video has shown how in the past, Tesla’s driving software plowed through a deer in the middle of the road and made no attempt to slow down. The other two resulted in property damage: a Robotaxi collided with a bicyclist in one incident, and hit a car in the other. No injuries were reported in any of the collisions.
That’s the extent of what we’re being told, anyway, since Tesla heavily censors its crash reports, a longstanding shady practice by the automaker. Tesla claims, spuriously, that the redacted details contain “confidential business information,” so it doesn’t have to disclose to the public how its tech is running amok on public roads.
Tesla also has a habit of belatedly reporting its crashes, and this August, the NHTSA launched an investigation into Tesla for just that. In some cases, the automaker didn’t report crashes until months after they happened.
To spell it all out: expect to hear even more crashes in the future.
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