Tesla Robotaxis are Much Worse than Human Drivers as Tesla Hides Details From Public

Last summer, Tesla officially rolled out its fleet of Robotaxis in Austin, Texas, providing the city with a driverless taxi service similar to Waymo and Zoox. While the announcement obviously fueled excitement at the time, the cars aren't actually performing that well.

In fact, according to Tesla's own data, it seems like the autonomous Robotaxis are actually significantly worse than human drivers.

Tesla Launched Robotaxis Last Summer

Last summer, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would begin rolling out its Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas.

“It’s prudent for us to start with a small number, confirm that things are going well and then scale it up,” Musk told CNBC during an interview.

Musk said that the robotaxis will be fully self-driving Tesla Model Y vehicles equipped with a forthcoming version of FSD (full self-driving) known as FSD Unsupervised.

He promised that the cars will be fully automatic and will not include safety drivers, though Tesla employees will be remotely monitoring the fleet to make sure everything goes smoothly.

“We’ll be watching what the cars are doing very carefully, and as confidence grows, less of that will be needed,” Musk said.

At the time, Musk said that the service would begin with about 10 active vehicles in the city, but would rapidly expand to thousands of vehicles if things went smoothly. Unfortunately for him and Tesla, things do not seem to be going smoothly.

Humans Are Still Significantly Safer

Tesla recently shared a “vehicle safety report” that reveals that its robotaxis got into five additional crashes in Austin, including one instance where the Tesla crashed into a fixed object at 17 miles per hour while going straight.

As Fortune points out, it's difficult to obtain any real details from these crashes since Tesla hides the details from the public, unlike its competitors.

"This is most of what we know, as unlike its other autonomous vehicle competitors Waymo and Zoox—and every other company in the market—Tesla is the only company to fully redact and hide details of all crashes from the public, thanks to a confidentiality provision under the NHTSA. Tesla even updated a report for a July 2025 crash—a right turn crash into an SUV while going 2mph—to mention that a victim was hospitalized, Electrek reported. The report initially listed 'property damage only,'" Catherina Gioino wrote for Fortune.

Despite the clear attempts to hide accident information from the public, even the limited aggregate data still indicates that human drivers are significantly safer than Tesla's Robotaxis, as Gioino points out.

"Still, the disclosures about the crashes underscore what Tesla has put forward for years regarding its autopilot program: humans are in fact safer. Actually, after this month’s events, they are four times safer, according to Tesla’s own metrics," Gioino wrote for Fortune.

This is consistent with the data from the early days of the Robotaxi rollout, and it doesn't seem like things have gotten all that better.