Five times now, a human working remotely has taken over a Tesla Robotaxi and the car has hit something. In every remote-operator takeover that has appeared in Tesla’s crash reports to federal regulators so far, the outcome was a collision. Two newly released filings, both from August 2026, brought the count to five.
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None of the five crashes injured anyone. They happened at walking speed, mostly in tight spaces, and each involved property damage only, but they land while Tesla runs its Robotaxi service in Austin, Dallas and Houston and while a U.S. senator is pressing autonomous-vehicle companies on how often their systems depend on people watching from afar.
The two August filings
Electrek’s Fred Lambert, in an October 15 analysis of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s September data release, describes both new reports. In Dallas (report 13781-16678), a Model Y was stopped on a residential street between a concrete mixer truck and a parked SUV when, in Tesla’s words, the remote operator took control and, while moving forward, the vehicle “made contact with the SUV at approximately 0.40MPH.” No passengers were aboard.
In Austin (report 13781-16679), a remote operator “was in control” of a Model Y going straight through an alley with a utility pole on one side and a dumpster on the other. The car hit the dumpster at about 1 mph, again with no passengers. Tesla coded both with the driver or operator type “Remote (Commercial / Test),” which means three of the five incidents are now formally labeled as remote operation.
The earlier three crashes
The pattern repeats across the older incidents. In July 2025 in Austin, a safety monitor could not get the car to proceed, a teleoperator took over, accelerated, turned left, drove up a curb and hit a metal fence at 8 mph. In January 2026, also in Austin, a teleoperator took over to give navigation help and drove into a construction barricade at 9 mph. Both surfaced only after Tesla unredacted its crash narratives in May 2026, reversing a position in which it argued disclosure would cause it financial harm.
The third came in May 2026 in Houston. According to Electrek’s July report, a Model Y stopped on a dead-end residential road needed help getting out, the vehicle entered a grassy slope while being supported remotely, and the remote operator hit a hidden tree stump at 2 mph. It was the first of Tesla’s incident reports to carry the remote-operator code.
What five of five can and cannot show
Electrek frames the sequence as a single script: the autonomous system gets stuck or needs help, a human takes over remotely, and the human crashes the car. A caution belongs next to that. Tesla does not disclose how often its remote operators intervene, so no crash rate can be calculated, and a filing exists only when something was hit. Five of five takeovers in crash reports is a striking tally, but it cannot say whether remote takeovers are more or less safe than the car driving itself.
The volume of reports is growing regardless. Tesla now has 36 unique Robotaxi incident reports under the Standing General Order, up from 22 when Electrek last reviewed the data in July 2026. The order requires reporting of automated-driving crashes involving certain property damage, injuries or tow-aways, and NHTSA publishes the redacted data as monthly files.
Context matters for fairness. Electrek’s review of the 17 narratives Tesla unredacted in May found that most Robotaxi crashes were caused by other drivers, typically rear-ending a stopped or nearly stopped Tesla, a pattern it says matches Waymo’s crash data. Operator-controlled crashes are a smaller, different category: cases where Tesla’s own staff, not a bystander, were driving when contact happened. Electrek also says the severity is not the main story, since Robotaxis are limited to surface streets at lower speeds, and speeds appear even lower during remote takeovers.
Waymo draws the line differently
Waymo has taken the opposite approach to remote control. In a February 2026 letter to Senator Ed Markey, it said it “has not used remote driving or ‘tele-operations'” in which a human performs the driving task. Its remote staff provide guidance that the vehicle can accept or reject, plus one narrow exception: a trained agent can nudge a stuck vehicle forward at 2 mph at fixed steering angles, a tool Waymo says has never been used outside training.
Markey’s inquiry covered seven companies, including Tesla and Waymo, and its March 31 report found that every one of them refused to say how often remote operators step in. “Autonomous vehicle companies make big promises about the safety of their self-driving cars,” Markey said in the announcement of the findings. “Now it is time they are honest about their technology’s reliance on human help.”
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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