According to a chart in Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings report showing cumulative robotaxi miles, the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles as of November 2025. That works out to roughly one crash every 55,000 miles.
For comparison, human drivers in the United States average approximately one police-reported crash every 500,000 miles, according to NHTSA data.
That means Tesla’s robotaxis are crashing at a rate 9 times higher than the average human driver.
However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin.
The safety monitor problem
Here’s what makes this data particularly damning: every Tesla robotaxi in the reported mileage had a safety monitor in the vehicle who can intervene at any moment.
These aren’t fully autonomous vehicles operating without backup. There’s a human sitting in the car whose entire job is to prevent crashes. And yet Tesla’s crash rate is still nearly an order of magnitude worse than regular human drivers operating alone.
Waymo, by comparison, operates a fully driverless fleet, no safety monitor, no human backup, and reports significantly better safety numbers. Waymo has logged over 125 million autonomous miles and maintains a crash rate well below human averages.
The transparency gap
Perhaps more troubling than the crash rate is Tesla’s complete lack of transparency about what happened.
Every single Tesla crash narrative in the NHTSA database is redacted with the same phrase: “[REDACTED, MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION]”
We know a Tesla robotaxi hit a cyclist. We don’t know what happened.
We know one caused a minor injury. We don’t know what happened.
We know one hit an animal at 27 mph. We don’t know what happened.
