The robotaxi trust problem

TL;DR: Tesla’s fledgling robotaxi service logged five new crashes in December and January, bringing the total to 14 since launching in Austin, Texas, last summer. The crash rate? Nearly four times higher than human drivers—a serious problem for a company betting its future on autonomous vehicles. It’s raising a question the entire industry can’t yet answer: Are robotaxis actually safer than having humans behind the wheel?

What happened: These latest Tesla crashes in Austin involved “a collision with a fixed object at 17 mph while the vehicle was driving straight, a crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary, a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph, and two separate incidents where the Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph,” according to Electrek.

Based on the roughly 800,000 cumulative paid miles Tesla has logged, Electrek estimated that its robotaxi fleet is crashing once every 57,000 miles—nearly four times more often than Tesla says human drivers crash. “That is not a rounding error or an early-program hiccup,” says Electrek. “It is a fundamental performance gap.”

It’s not just Tesla: Zoox and Waymo have also made headlines for incidents involving their driverless vehicles. Just last month, Waymo reported that one of its vehicles struck a child near a school in Santa Monica, California, causing minor injuries (though it claimed the vehicle braked quicker than a human driver likely would have). Federal regulators are also investigating numerous instances of Waymo robotaxis illegally passing stopped school buses.

The stakes are high: Musk has bet Tesla’s future on pivoting to AI and robotics, with big plans to grow its robotaxi fleet. Investors have also poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the robotaxi sector (see Waymo’s latest $16 billion fundraising round).

AVs have long been touted as a way to make US roadways—where tens of thousands of people die every year—safer for human drivers and pedestrians. The underlying promise of the tech is that they are better drivers than their error-prone human counterparts; they don’t drink and drive or succumb to road rage, for example. Waymo claims it has achieved “a 90% reduction in serious injury crashes” across 127 million miles of fully autonomous driving, compared to the average human driver.

But as David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, wrote in Bloomberg: “We don’t yet know whether a robotaxi trip is more or less likely to result in a crash than an equivalent one driven by a human.” There’s also evidence that people hold self-driving vehicles to a higher standard than their fellow humans—which means even if robotaxis match human safety records, it might not be enough to win public trust.

What’s next: Waymo now provides more than 400,000 weekly rides in six US metro areas and plans to launch in 20 new cities this year. Tesla execs say they want to expand robotaxis to seven new operating areas in 2026. As these companies push for mainstream adoption, expect increased scrutiny over whether the safety records they’re touting actually hold up. —JG