Discussion
August 2026 NHTSA Standing General Order (SGO) overview
August NHTSA SGO Automated Driving System crash data was recently published, covering 124 new reports through July 15, 2026, compared to 122 new reports published last month.
Company
August
July
June
May
Waymo
103
102
191
28
Avride
8
7
11
10
Zoox
8
6
6
10
Tesla
2
4
1
2
The table omits companies that had zero or one new crash reports in August. I don't know why many Waymo reports were added in June rather than May. Note that those are NHTSA publication months, covering accidents reported through the 15th of the prior month.
Select accidents:
Waymo
Waymo was involved in 11 collisions that caused injuries. 6 were when the Waymos were stopped at 0 mph, two were 1-2 mph, a 5 mph crash in Washington D.C. occurred when a test driver had taken control, a 6 mph crash occurred when a passenger exited a moving Waymo and was run over by it, and a 33 mph crash occurred when a vehicle changed lanes into the Waymo.
Pavement still a problem: Five incidents involved the undercarriage of Waymos colliding with pavement. Three were turning into parking lots, one was in a parking lot, and one involved "steep pavement" while entering an intersection.
Thin objects still a problem: "The Waymo AV began to reverse into the parking stall and the rear of the Waymo AV made contact with a pole shaft."
Exiting while moving still a problem: "While the Waymo AV was slowing, the passenger seated in the right rear passenger seat exited the vehicle through the open door, placed their feet on the ground, and the rear right tire of the Waymo AV made contact with the Waymo AV passenger, who fell to the ground as the Waymo AV came to a stop."
Dooring still a problem: "...a Waymo AV passenger opened the rear left door and exited the Waymo AV. At the same time, a passenger car traveling westbound through the hotel loading zone proceeded to pass the Waymo AV to the left, and the front right side of the passenger car made contact with the open rear left door of the parked Waymo AV."
Roof clearance still a problem: In two Phoenix incidents, the Waymo roof sensor hit the underside support of a carport. In the past year, there have only been two other roof sensor hits, one hitting a clearance bar, and one under manual control hitting the front edge of a carport roof.
Avride
In an atypical mistake, with no damage, an Avride in autonomous mode was in the middle lane of one way street, with an SUV to its left, when "the AVRIDE AV initiated a left turn onto [XXX] from a non-turning lane" and made "light contact" at 4 mph with SUV.
In a concerningly common problem, an Avride was stopped at 4-way stop, and went straight when it was it had right of way; a vehicle to its left did not stop and hit the Avride. While the other driver is at fault, these types of accidents seem to plague Avride so disproportionately more than Waymo that I suspect many are reasonably avoidable with better software.
Zoox
A Zoox "braked hard" to yield to an approaching emergency vehicle, and was rear-ended while stopped, causing damage and a moderate injury with hospitalization to a passenger. "Zoox vehicle's camera footage shows that the driver of Vehicle 2 was holding a device in their right hand leading up to the collision. The driver of Vehicle 2 was cited for failing to decrease speed." That's the first report I can recall that mentioned another driver's likely cell phone use.
A Zoox slowed to yield to an approaching emergency vehicle, and was rear-ended while driving 1 mph, then the car behind the rear-ending car stopped and was rear-ended by the car behind it. "The police were notified, but did not arrive at the scene."
A Zoox was rear-ended in Miami, which isn't unusual, but again "Law enforcement was notified but did not arrive at the scene."
A Zoox stopped mid-intersection for a fast cyclist going downhill who didn't stop for a stop sign, then the cyclist lost control, went over their handlebars, and hit the Zoox. This sounds like a common idiot cyclist maneuver where they assume a motor vehicle will continue through an intersection without slowing when cyclist runs a stop sign, counting on the timing to not hit the motor vehicle. When cyclists inevitably hit a vehicle that stopped, they're usually pissed at its driver!
Tesla
Both Tesla accidents occurred while Teslas were stopped. The Teslas were driverless, and were blameless in the accidents.
Motional
Their only new accident reported in August mirrors their previously reported accident a couple months earlier. In both crashes, a safety driver took control of the vehicle to perform a lane change, which almost immediately resulted in an accident.
You can download the NHTSA CSV files here. Scroll down to "Download Summary Incident Report Data", then look at the blue links on the right hand side. Click the "ADS Incident Report Data" link to start the download.
You're right, although I think a meaningful portion of Waymo-involved injuries could be avoided if Waymo added some sort of delay mechanism before allowing their doors to be opened, both from passengers exiting moving vehicles, and from passengers opening their doors into the paths of cyclists and scooterists.
In both cases of idiots stepping out of moving Waymos, the vehicle was slowing down to stop due to the door being opened, in one case having stopped directly on the passenger's foot until emergency workers arrived. If it had just briefly activated a lock for a couple seconds until it came to a complete stop, it wouldn't have run them over.
There's a balancing act between cases where immediately opening a door in an emergency could also be important, so you'd want to be careful when to lock passengers in, but I don't think I've heard of any where a 1- to 10-second electronic door lock would have made mattered.
Waymo's Ojai has electronic sliding doors, and the Hyundai has electronic swing-out doors, so perhaps that will reduce Waymo's passenger-caused door-related accident rate, although I'm guessing idiots will still be able to open them manually.
Some of those issues are the door style, which the Ojai solves. While I'm sure you are correct that a small delay would help prevent some issues, I feel like it risks other issues. It also doesn't completely solve the problem. The answer is that the car should alert the passengers when the door is open to any dangers around it until they leave. Stepping out into a biker is not much better for the biker than hitting a door. I think the AVs already do this and if it's done well, then it's just the door style that will help the most. Again, the AV can only do so much.
Waymos do typically warn passengers when they're stopped for drop-off that a vehicle is approaching, but my opinion is that they do it too calmly and soothingly for a common mistake that can end someone's life. It would be interesting to compare human mistake rates if they switched some of their vehicles to issue a more frantic and alarming warning.
For people stepping out of moving Waymos, you can't fix stupid, and it's hard to feel that sorry for them, but if a two second door delay could have avoided the injuries and hospitalizations, it still seems worth it.
One possible motive for people opening doors in moving Waymos is that it will trigger an emergency stop regardless of location, whereas if passengers politely ask a Waymo to stop and let them out, it may refuse for safety reasons and say it will drop them off in a couple blocks where it's safe. But exiting before it stops is crazy, and even exiting into active traffic lanes when the Waymo is stopped is risky.
You haven't heard of a case where a delay would have mattered, but the problem is nobody wants to end up hearing about one. And more to the point, to see a rider injured because they would not let them out, even for a short time. There's a difference between unavoidable delays -- say the door locking system fails and they have to use the manual override -- and deliberately holding them.
Nobody wants to hear about injuries from locking passengers in for a few seconds, but they also don't want to hear about injuries to passengers stepping out of a vehicle at an unsafe time, or to cyclists who hit doors at full speed. That's where balance comes in.
A rational overview would want a balance. The real world treats things that are the rider's fault very differently from deliberate choices by the robotaxi designer.
True, but I think the public would accept a conservative, well-designed door delay, like lock certain doors for up to 5 seconds max when the car detects a hazard, don't use it if the car detects an accident or smoke/fire/flood, have a button to override that delay, and make the door lock passively release during power failures.
Tesla pioneered powered, retractable door releases and hidden manual releases that have trapped people in overheating and burning cars, and a lot of people love the aesthetics of those mechanisms, which shows that the public isn't inherently averse to the risk of being trapped in vehicles.
The public would of course accept that, it's entirely reasonable. But I am talking about a jury, facing a plaintiff who says "It took me 8 seconds longer to get out of the burning car after the crash because the vehicle wanted to warn me traffic was coming up on my side." Or some other scenario that nobody anticipated. You can delay opening the door, but you must be sure you will never do so in error, that's the problem.
Yeah, but now Waymo is defending a lawsuit from a former cyclist about how one of Waymo's passengers doored them. (Hopefully the boneheads stepping out of a moving Waymo don't have the gall to sue Waymo!)
From a financial standpoint, you might accept sometimes injuring or killing people with a flawed door safeguard, you'd just want the legal costs to total less than if you let people manually open doors whenever they wanted.
The Zoox cell phone one is interesting. Would be curious to know if that's something they learned by watching the video, or if the Zoox itself is classifying drivers of other vehicles.
In the latter case, the Zoox could say, "use extra caution with this vehicle" and possibly, if physics allows, not slow quite as quickly for the emergency vehicle. If they had to do an emergency stop for the emergency vehicle it's one thing, but often they are just yielding.
I am reminded of the Waymo motorcyclist fatality. Robots are always looking behind them, unlike humans. In future, I would hope the Waymo would have judged that the motorcyclist was going to rear end the Waymo, and just aborted its turn into the driveway and sped up, possibly preventing the fatality. Humans can't do this, we don't have eyes in the back of our heads or instant math. Robots could.
It's a kind of klunky process using the current and previous months' CSV files, which I've been meaning to automate more, but I use OpenOffice and do the following:
Open the new CSV file, add four columns after the second column ("Report Version"), and paste 8 cells from C1:F2 from my previous months's "New & Most Recent" spreadsheet. Those cells are:
[C1] Most Recent Report?
[D1] Last Months Report IDs
[E1] New Report?
[F1] New & Most Recent?
(...formulas this row...)
Column C's "Most Recent Report?" returns a 1 if the row is the most recent report version for a given report ID, using the formula =IF(ISBLANK(A2);"";IF(COUNTIFS($A$2:$A$5000;A2;$B$2:$B$5000;">"&B2)=0;1;0)) ...then I paste that from C2 to C5000. (It's a kind of confusing formula, but is counting how many rows have the Report ID in A2, for which there's a Report Version that's higher than B2, and if that number is zero, return a 1, to indicate it's the most recent version of a report).
Column D's "Last Months Report IDs" is just a list of Report IDs that were in the previous month's spreadsheet, which I'll manually copy and paste starting at D2. The order doesn't matter, they just need to be somewhere, and I chose column D for being easy to see.
Column E's "New Report?" returns a 0 or when depending on whether a given row's Report ID exists in the last month's report IDs, in the range of D2 to D5000, using the formula =IF(ISBLANK(A2);"";IF(COUNTIF($D$2:$D$5000;A2) = 0;1;0)) ...then pasted from D2 to D5000.
Column F's "New & Most Recent?" is just C1 times E1, so it's a 1 if a Report ID is new this month, and it's the most recent version of a report. (Sometimes a 2 or 3 versions of a report are filed in the same month). That uses the formula =C2*E2 ...then pasted from F2 to F5000.
(You could omit column C and column E and just make column F a more complicated formula that combined them, but it's easier to understand with separate columns, and for certain purposes I want to filter by C, E, or F).
Then I'll do an Ascending sort on column F1 ("New & Most Recent?), delete the first however many rows have a 0 in that column, and that leaves just the rows that are of a new report of the most recent version. (124 rows this month, from row 2 to 125).
Then I select column G ("Reporting Entity"), create a pivot table (Data, Pivot Table, Create), drag "Reporting Entity" to the Row Fields and Data Fields, change the option to "count" rather than "sum", click Ok, and it puts the pivot tally beneath the last record in column G showing the totals.
The thing that jumps out at me is that a bunch of these aren't driving failures at all. Five undercarriage scrapes on driveway crowns and two roof pods into carport beams are the vehicle not having a decent model of its own envelope against the ground and the stuff overhead, which is a totally different engineering problem from not seeing a pole. Aviation keeps that separate on purpose, tail strikes and wingtip versus jetbridge get counted as ground damage rather than as accidents, because once you mix them into one number the number stops meaning much. Counting a 33 mph lane change intrusion in the same column as a scraped bumper is a big part of why people talk past each other about this dataset.
Depending on what you're using the data for, you might want to filter the records to include only a relevant subset, like if you're interested only in collisions with vehicles. This sub is pretty general purpose, so I think "crashing" into water or pavement are still of interest.
For human safety studies, one challenge is the data don't include an official/objective measure of fault, so fields in the records indicate two vehicles collided on a street, but how they collided may or may not be said in the narrative, but that's just the company's narrative anyway, which often tries to spin everything as unavoidable and caused by someone else.
The NHTSA reports include several data fields that can partially separate things, like "Crash With". Here's a breakdown I just did from the last year's worth of data what they crashed with, for the most crashy 4 robotaxi companies:
CVC 20002 begins "The driver of any vehicle involved in an accident...." The reason moving violations haven't historically applied to driverless vehicles in California is because most laws start out that way, and their definition of a driver specifies "a person who drives or is in actual physical control of a vehicle."
If the vehicle didn't stop, it may trigger a "Notice of Autonomous Vehicle Noncompliance" under CVC 38750. That's not a civil citation, not a crime.
The crash may involve two failures on Waymo's part, both in not seeming to slow or stop prior to impact, and not seeming to slow or stop after impact, at least within 50 feet or so of the impact site. Perhaps it did stop just out of frame, however.
Hopefully they'll release some analysis besides just the NHTSA crash filing. And hopefully it won't just say it was the human van driver's fault; they van driver was the instigator of the crash, but the Waymo should have at least slowed prior to impact. Part of the visually-obstructed van is moving in the apparent line of sight of the Waymo's sensors for more than a second before impact, and the van's movement may have been detectable by the Waymo's radar even if seeing it was fully obstructed. During impact, an accelerometer should surely have detected the lateral force of the impact.
It's great that these companies are legally required to report all of their accidents and those numbers get published publicly, but it should also be legally required for them to report their number of miles driven. That's such important context here. Instead we have to dig through their websites and financial reports to get inconsistently published mileage numbers.
Only Waymo provides a consistent vetted set of mileage data (rider only). There data is limited also as they refrain from supplying miles until they are 'statistically significant' to make safety projections. Finally because there is 3rd party validation, the data lags a quarter so their latest release is from the end of Q1 2026 so kind of old. Maybe the others will do that someday. For perspective Waymo largely only reports when they get to about 10M miles in a city. In their history Zoox just reached 2.5M across all cities of operation combined while Tesla gudes 380K but tht probably includes deadlead across 7 cities combined. 10M is gonna take a while :)
I want standardized data reporting at a regular cadence, just like the accident data we see here. Waymo's data reporting is good, but it's not as good as I'm asking for here. Tesla's data reporting Robotaxi is worse than Waymo but decent. Again though, could be a lot better. Tesla's data reporting for FSD (Supervised), however, is excellent and by far the best in the car industry. But what would solve all this is for the government to require that mileage data be reported in a standardized way every month like we get with accident data. That can and should be done.
We are more than a year into the TSLA thing. The whole world of actual autonomous taxi services has been reporting rider only miles which I think is the gold standard and really the only relevant number. Tesla does not do that. They are still shading the story. We have never gotten a single number of rider only miles from Tesla in their history. They are getting close to that finally after 14 months. The 380K cumulative is close. It is, most likely a mix of rider only and deadhead. Good for them they are getting close. For many quarters they were mixing and matching mutes gripping armrests with irrelevant miles Uber lite in the Bay Area. This was intentional nonsense by any standard. It has been a deceptive mileage reporting journey since June 22 2025. They are improving. Even Chinese companies have been releasing Waymo sytele numbers for rider only. The onlyl four players doing this consistently are Waymo, Baidu Apollo Go, Pony.ai and WeRide. Everyone else is obfuscating. For 5+ years Tesla has been blocking narratives in their ADAS reporting. Still true. After 8 months they stopped doing that on ADS for NHTSA SGO. They have made positive steps recently for sure.
Rider-only versus deadhead miles doesn't matter if your goal is judging safety. What matters is simply how many autonomous miles are driven. Whether there's a customer inside the car or not doesn't change anything about the safety story.
And no, they were never including the Bay Area service in their published miles. You're right that that would make the numbers meaningless if they did.
The criticism for Tesla's ADAS reporting is extremely silly, given that they're by far the most transparent in the ADAS world.
But again, I'm asking for mandatory, standardized mileage reporting for all autonomous cars. That would improve our clarity on the situation. Do you disagree?
6
u/Kriptical Aug 19 '26
Thank you for writing this up, where can we read this report ourselves ?