Tesla’s robotaxis have been involved in over a dozen crashes in Austin, Texas, since service began

A Tesla robotaxi in Austin, Texas, United States. Photo / Tim Goessman, Bloomberg via The Washington Post

Tesla’s robotaxis have been involved in over a dozen crashes in Austin, Texas, since service began, according to reports the carmaker has made to United States regulators.

The electric vehicle maker has said its nascent robotaxi business has been involved in 14 crash incidents in about eight months, according to data sent to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

A US federal order requires carmakers to report when automated driving systems are involved in certain crashes.

Tesla launched its limited robotaxi service in Austin last June with about a dozen cars accompanied by human safety monitors and has slowly increased the fleet.

Its first crash happened in July, according to the standing order, with the company reporting at the time that the incident only involved property damage.

But Tesla submitted another incident report for that crash in December adding information that the accident had led to minor injuries and hospitalisation. Another incident, also from July, also caused minor injuries.

In January, Tesla’s latest report shows five new incidents that occurred that month and in December. One of the January incidents included a crash between a stopped robotaxi and an Austin city bus. There were two incidents in which a robotaxi backed into objects in parking lots.

After tests in December, Tesla began offering driverless rides without any safety monitor in the car in “a few” vehicles in its Austin fleet in January.

It was not immediately clear if any of the incidents reported involved vehicles without safety monitors.

Information is limited for all of Tesla’s incidents and, unlike competitors, Tesla redacts narrative descriptions. The vast majority of its incident reports just cited property damage.

Austin remains the only city where Tesla is offering robotaxi rides. The company launched a service on the same app, in the San Francisco Bay Area last year, but those trips use human drivers and is more akin to Uber.

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has increasingly bet the carmaker’s future on autonomy and robotics as the core EV business has struggled.

Tesla has not disclosed how large its current Austin robotaxi fleet is. In January, Musk said that between Austin and the Bay Area, there were 500 rideshare vehicles.

Competitor, Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, which operates about 2500 vehicles in Phoenix, San Francisco, Austin, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Miami, and also tests autonomously in other locations, has reported hundreds of incidents since last June.

This includes about 50 incidents in Austin, where it operates about 200 vehicles on the Uber app.

Tesla has said it aims to expand to about seven more cities by the middle of the year but did not achieve similar expansion predictions for the end of last year.

Its operation lags behind Waymo, which began offering driverless rides to the public in the Phoenix area in 2020.

- With assistance from Natalie Lung.

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