A 2020 Honda Accord running comma.ai’s openpilot driver-assist software rear-ended a stopped car at 82 mph on a Missouri highway in September 2025, the fastest impact among five crashes now detailed in a federal investigation into the aftermarket system. The crash left one occupant with a serious enough injury to require hospitalization. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration records show the driver had set adaptive cruise control to 80 mph and fallen asleep before the car plowed into traffic ahead.
NHTSA opened the inquiry, designated PE26007, on Sept. 21, 2026. It covers an estimated 30,000 comma three, comma 3X and comma four hardware units, the small dashboard-mounted devices that let owners run the open-source openpilot software in place of a factory driver-assist system.
A Honda Accord at 82 mph, then a Corolla at 56
The Missouri crash is the one with the sharpest numbers attached. Openpilot was “verified engaged” at the moment of impact, according to Electrek’s account of the underlying crash report, and the Accord never slowed before striking the stopped vehicle at 82 mph.
A second, slower version of the same failure played out ten months later. In July 2026, a 2021 Toyota Corolla running openpilot hit a stopped passenger car near Mona, Utah, at 56 mph. NHTSA’s filing groups it with the Missouri crash as an incident in which a comma-equipped vehicle struck a vehicle that was stopped or moving slowly in the same lane it was traveling.
Scale is part of what makes the pattern worth a federal look. Comma.ai says drivers running its hardware have logged more than 300 million miles, with the software actively steering and braking for 56 percent of those miles, and counts more than 20,000 active users of the devices its engineers keep shipping. Against that base, five confirmed crashes is a small fraction — but NHTSA’s mandate is to act on a pattern, not a rate, once fatalities and serious injuries start showing up in the same failure mode.
A first responder’s vehicle and a fatal crash in Louisiana
Not every crash in the investigation was a near-miss with survivable speed. In February 2026, a 2022 Toyota RAV4 equipped with a comma device struck a stopped first-responder vehicle on a highway in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, killing one person. Comma.ai told NHTSA the device in that vehicle “appears to have been running 3rd party non-comma software” rather than its own release at the time of the crash — an argument that, if borne out, would complicate any attempt to hold the company’s own code responsible for that specific outcome.
Two of the five documented crashes turned fatal. Three people died and eleven others were injured across the five incidents, according to the ODI resume NHTSA published for PE26007. That document does not identify the states, vehicles or speeds involved in each crash — those specifics come from the crash reports Electrek reviewed, not from the summary NHTSA posted publicly.
What NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation found in common
The pattern that drew NHTSA’s attention runs through all five crashes: openpilot-equipped vehicles struck stopped or slow-moving traffic in their own lane. “Preliminary data reviewed by ODI suggests that the comma system may not have adequately detected or responded to the in-lane vehicles,” the agency’s Office of Defects Investigation wrote in the resume. ODI said it had confirmed the openpilot system was powered on or engaged in multiple of the crashes under review.
Those crash reports exist in the first place because of a separate NHTSA rule. The agency’s Standing General Order on crash reporting requires makers of Level 2 driver-assist systems to notify NHTSA when a crash involving their technology causes a fatality, hospital transport, an airbag deployment or a struck pedestrian or cyclist within 30 seconds of the system being engaged. Comma.ai’s five-crash count came from exactly that reporting pipeline, not from a recall or a lawsuit. The order’s most recent amendment, effective June 16, 2025, requires five-day reports for the most severe crashes — the kind involving a death or a hospital transport, like the Missouri and Louisiana incidents — and monthly reports for lesser ones.
Comma.ai has not conceded that the pattern points to a defect in its own code. In the crash reports NHTSA cites, the company added a standing disclaimer that it was responding “without agreeing with NHTSA’s interpretations or conceding that comma is obligated to respond,” language that preserves its legal position even as it supplies the underlying data the agency is now analyzing.
Openpilot’s pitch against the investigation’s findings
Comma.ai markets openpilot as an open-source system compatible with more than 350 car models from Toyota, Honda, Hyundai and other brands, and its product page tells prospective buyers the software “can drive for hours without intervention” once installed. The company’s own site still stresses that a driver must be able to immediately retake manual control, the same expectation NHTSA says failed to hold in at least two of the five crashes now under review.
None of this closes the investigation. A Preliminary Evaluation is the first of several steps NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation can take, and it can end in a finding that no defect exists, an upgrade to a full Engineering Analysis, or a request that comma.ai issue a recall or safety fix. For now, the record NHTSA has made public consists of five crash reports, three deaths, eleven injuries and one confirmed speed: 82 mph.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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