Data revealed by Tesla while it was reporting its fourth-quarter financial results suggests that its much-hyped "Robotaxi" service is dangerously troubled. Despite plans to expand into more American cities, the automaker’s figures suggest that its autonomous test vehicles have been involved in many times more incidents than the average human driver.
According to the automaker's Q4 2025 earnings report, Tesla Robotaxi, a driverless ride hailing service that operates in a limited capacity in Austin, Texas, racked up around 804,700 km (500,000 miles) of driving between November 2025 and June 2025, when the program started.
Separately, the automaker reported nine collisions involving its Austin robotaxi fleet to America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in that same period, as first reported by Electrek. While nine incidents doesn’t sound like much, it works out to roughly one incident per 89,000 km (55,000 miles) on the road.
According to NHTSA, human drivers are involved in just one police-reported accident per 804,700 km (500,000 miles). However, given the heightened level of scrutiny focused on automated driving, it is fair to assume that some of the incidents that Tesla’s Austin robotaxis were involved in might not have been reported to the police if a human driver had been behind the wheel.
Even accounting for that, though, Tesla’s robotaxis crashed significantly more than humans. Estimates suggest that, including collision that aren’t reported to police, drivers are involved an incident every 321,900 km (200,000 miles), on average, making Tesla’s robotaxis nearly four times as incident prone as humans.
Tesla’s pilot project isn’t even performing well when compared to other companies involved in autonomous driving. Companies like Waymo, that have racked up 10s of millions of miles of testing report lower incident rates than human drivers, even though they have no human safety monitors onboard, like Tesla’s robotaxis have.
Despite the poor performance of its test vehicles, Tesla still aims to expand. Autonews reports that Tesla aims to expand its robotaxi service to seven additional cities in the first half of 2026: Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas. Moreover, the automaker says it is installing production lines for its Cybercab, a two-door vehicle with no human-oriented controls, at its Texas factory.
