In both crashes in Austin, “safety monitors” were in the passenger seats of the vehicles to monitor the still-fledgling self-driving technology, and no passengers were riding in the cars. Both accidents occurred at speeds less than 10 mph. The new details were first reported by TechCrunch.
In an incident that occurred in July 2025, a safety monitor experienced “minor” injuries after a remote worker drove a Tesla into a metal fence at 8 mph. The monitor, who requested help from Tesla’s remote driving team after the car stopped on the side of the road and would not move, was not hospitalized, Tesla said.
The second incident, in January 2026, occurred after a security monitor requested navigation assistance from the remote team. The remote driver took control and drove the car at 9 mph straight into a makeshift construction barricade. The robotaxi’s front left fender and tire were torn off in the accident, but Tesla reported no injuries.
Tesla, which does not have a public relations team, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The new details draw attention to an often misunderstood but safety-critical part of autonomous vehicle operations: human backstops that remotely monitor robot cars and intervene if they get into trouble. According to letters submitted to a US senator earlier this year, all US self-driving operators maintain these remote teams. But Tesla seems to be an outlier because it often allows these remote workers to directly drive the car.
Other companies typically allow their employees to remotely provide input to autonomous vehicle software, which the system can choose to use or reject. (Waymo says specially trained employees can remotely drive its cars at up to 2 mph, but it said in February it had not used that functionality outside of training.)
Safety advocates have raised questions about remote driving, which can be challenging in locations without consistent cellular connectivity and in contexts where remote drivers need an accurate understanding of the car’s surroundings to navigate out of complex situations.
The new details on the two Tesla crashes “raise questions about what the teleoperator can see in both coverage and resolution, and what kind of latency they are experiencing while driving,” Noah Goodall, an independent self-driving vehicle researcher, told WIRED in a message.
Tesla’s still-fledgling robotaxi service is operating in three Texas cities: Austin, Dallas, and Houston. But the service has less than 100 vehicles total, compared to Waymo’s nearly 4,000. It appears that less than half of Tesla’s cars are driven without a safety monitor in the passenger seat. Reuters reported this week that in Houston and Dallas, where robotaxis were launched in April, service wait times exceed 35 minutes. Even in Austin, where the cars have been carrying passengers for about a year, a reporter for the publication found that robotaxis were sometimes completely unavailable.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said the automaker’s focus is on autonomous vehicles and robotics rather than building electric cars. Musk’s compensation—a potential $1 trillion salary by 2035—is now tied to the vehicle And Robot delivery, as well as yet-to-be-released self-driving subscription sales and the number of robotaxis in commercial operation.
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