Another Tesla “Robotaxi” has crashed in Austin, Texas, Electrek reports — and the automaker is trying to keep everything it can about it under wraps.
In an updated crash report this week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration revealed that another Robotaxi collision had taken place in September, making it the fourth reported crash from the Robotaxi service since it launched in late June. What actually happened, however, is impossible to determine. As it’s done in the past, Tesla redacted most of the crash information, an unusually shady practice that makes it an outlier among its competitors.
What we do know, per the NHTSA report, is that the crash took place in a parking lot after a Robotaxi slammed into a “fixed object.” No one was hurt, but property damage was listed. Numerous past incidents have shown the Tesla taxis struggle to navigate parking lots.
It doesn’t sound like a particularly severe accident, but it’s striking that these crashes are happening at all. Not only are the Tesla cabs limited to a highly-mapped out and small area of a single city — at least for the time being — but they’re also supervised by a human “safety monitor” sitting in the front passenger seat who can intervene at any moment to stop a crash. The service also relies on a hidden backbone of teleoperators who can pilot the vehicles remotely when needed. That invites scrutiny into how many more crashes there could’ve been had humans not been around to step in — a timely question, because CEO Elon Musk last week promised to remove safety monitors entirely “by the end of the year.”
Given the service’s small size, the crashes are worryingly frequent. As Electrek notes, the company revealed in an earnings call last week that its fleet had traveled 250,000 miles since launching late June, which translates to a crash every 62,500 miles. Waymo, for comparison, has a crash every 98,600 miles —and that’s without a safety monitor or any physical human supervision.
This is far from the only time Tesla has redacted crash information, too. The first three Robotaxi crash reports were also heavily censored, and the practice has more or less become the norm for the company. As justification, Tesla claims that the excised details contain “confidential business information.”
And the practice isn’t just limited to Robotaxis. It also heavily redacts information about crashes involving its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving modes, removing details like crash narrative and the date of the incident. Sometimes, the NHTSA has even redacted crash report information at Tesla’s request, The New Yorker reported in 2023.
Automakers are obligated to report crashes to the NHTSA within five days of learning about them. But Tesla has played by its own rules here as well. This August, the NHTSA launched a probe into Tesla because it often failed to report self-driving crashes in time, sometimes months after the fact. It blamed these tardy reports on an “issue” with its data collection.
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