For greater than a yr, Tesla has shielded particulars about its robotaxi crashes from public view. Now, the corporate has printed new particulars in a federal database about 17 incidents, which happened between July 2025 and March 2026. In at the very least two of them, Tesla’s human staff seem to have performed a hand within the crashes by remotely driving the in any other case autonomous automobiles into objects on the road.
In each crashes, which occurred in Austin, “security screens” have been within the automobiles’ passenger seats to oversee the still-fledgling self-driving tech, and no passengers have been driving within the automobiles. 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 happened in July 2025, the protection monitor skilled “minor” accidents after a distant employee drove the Tesla up a curb and right into a steel fence at 8 mph. The monitor, who had requested assist from Tesla’s distant driving crew after the automotive stopped on the aspect 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 crew. The distant driver took management and drove the automotive 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 crew, didn’t reply to WIRED’s request for remark.
The brand new particulars draw consideration to an typically misunderstood however safety-critical a part of autonomous automobile operations: the human backstops who remotely monitor the robotic automobiles and intervene once they get into hassle. All US self-driving operators keep these distant groups, in keeping 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 automobiles.
Different corporations sometimes enable their staff to remotely present enter to the autonomous automobile software program, which the system can select to make use of or reject. (Waymo says that specifically skilled staff can remotely drive its automobiles as much as 2 mph, however said in February that it hadn’t used that performance exterior of coaching.)
Security advocates have raised questions about remote driving, which will be difficult in locations with out constant mobile connectivity and in contexts the place distant drivers want an ideal understanding of a automotive’s environment to information it out of complicated conditions.
The brand new particulars on the 2 Tesla crashes “increase questions on what the teleoperator can see in each protection and backbone, and what sort of latency they’re experiencing whereas driving,” Noah Goodall, an unbiased self-driving automobile 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 automobiles working in whole, in comparison with Waymo’s practically 4,000. Lower than half of Tesla’s automobiles seem to function with out a 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 automobiles have been carrying passengers for nearly a yr, a reporter for the publication discovered that robotaxis have been typically fully unavailable.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that autonomous automobiles and robotics are the automaker’s focus as an alternative of producing electrical automobiles. Musk’s compensation—a possible $1 trillion paycheck by 2035—is now tied to automobile and robotic deliveries, in addition to gross sales of not-yet-released self-driving subscriptions and the variety of robotaxis in business operation.
