Tesla continues its mission to bring autonomous vehicles to the road, despite the fact that limited pilot testing in Austin, Texas, is not going well. First, the cars were put into traffic there in a limited area with safety drivers, and at the end of last year, they removed those operators from the vehicles and moved them – to vehicles that follow the robot taxis on the road. Furthermore, the crash statistics are not in their favor, so recently it was revealed that Tesla’s accident rate in its robotaxi trial program is roughly twice as high (per mileage) as that of rival company Waymo.
They collide eight times more often than humans
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) also published new data this week that indicate serious safety challenges facing Tesla’s robot taxis in Austin. According to the updated database, the company reported five new collisions in December 2025 and January 2026, bringing the total number of incidents since the launch of the service last June to 14.
When that number of accidents is put into the context of kilometers traveled, the data becomes quite embarrassing for Musk’s company. Their fleet is estimated to have covered approximately 1.3 million kilometers by mid-January, which means that one collision occurs every 91,000 kilometers.
According to Tesla’s own safety report, the average American driver experiences a minor crash every 368,500 kilometers. This means that Tesla’s robotaxis are involved in accidents almost four times more often than human drivers. Using NHTSA’s broader data on reported accidents, where the average is one incident every 805,000 kilometers, Tesla’s fleet is as much as eight times more likely to crash than humans. Of additional concern is the fact that almost all of these accidents occurred with the presence of a trained safety operator in the vehicle. They are there to intervene at critical moments, suggesting that without human supervision the number of incidents would likely be even higher.
Cybercab is being produced
All that, however, did not slow down their ambitions – from Tesla’s Gigatfactory in Texas, located not far from Austin, information arrives that the first Cybercab, a car without a steering wheel and pedals, built “from the ground up” to serve as a robot taxi, has rolled off the production line there.
The vehicle, called Cybercab, is designed as a two-seater, completely devoid of traditional controls. It is equipped with a 35 kWh battery that provides a range of approximately 320 kilometers, with support for inductive wireless charging. Elon Musk described the model’s production process as more similar to that of the consumer electronics industry than the classic automotive industry, with an ambitious goal of a production run of one car every 10 seconds.
Tesla
The projected price of the vehicle should be less than $30,000, and its sole purpose is to function as an autonomous taxi. Cybercab does not offer alternative driving options. It is designed in such a way that in the event of a malfunction or problem with the software, the vehicle is literally undriveable, so the question arises whether the software side of the company will solve the open (primarily security) issues in time.