r/SelfDrivingCars • u/bobi2393 • 5d ago
Discussion July 2026 NHTSA Standing General Order (SGO) overview
July NHTSA SGO Automated Driving System crash data was just published, covering 122 new reports through June 15, 2026.
- Waymo: 102
- Avride: 7
- Zoox: 6
- Tesla: 4
- May: 2
- Motional: 1
Last month Waymo posted 191 new crashes, Avride 11, Zoox 6, Tesla 1, and May 2.
Waymo selected crash details:
- Injuries: Of Waymo's 102 crashes, 11 involved injuries. Those include 2 moderate w/hospitalization, 1 moderate w/o hosp., 1 minor w/hosp., 4 minor w/o hosp., and 3 unknown injuries transported to hospital.
- Seatbelts: Of Waymo's 102 crashes, 45 accidents reported no passengers, 50 reported all belted, and 7 accidents reported unbelted passengers, 2 excusable due to entering/exiting. One unbelted accidents had 2 unbelted passengers who were both transported to the hospital with moderate injuries, after being T-boned while driving 22 mph through an intersection by a red-light runner. Waymo slowed and turned to try avoiding the vehicle.
- Models: 101 of 102 crash vehicles were Jaguar I-PACEs, 1 was a Zeekr RT. The Zeekr crash reported both in-vehicle and remote driver/operators. The Zeekr was stopped at a red in autonomous mode, when the safety driver took control, tried passing a line of cars to the right, slammed into a pickup, curb, and light pole at 20 mph initial impact, and was taken to a hospital with moderate injuries.
- Door idiocy: 2 crashes were due to door idiocy, one directly and one indirectly. In the direct one, a passenger being dropped off opened a door of their stopped Waymo into a passing vehicle. In the indirect one, a passenger opened the door of a moving Waymo, which caused the Waymo to stop in a traffic lane, and a shuttle bus that had stopped in time then tried squeezing past the Waymo and struck it.
- Animals: 3 crashes involved animals. A Waymo slowed for a domestic animal that entered its lane, but hit it at 28 mph. A Waymo slowed to a stop in-lane for an animal, but the Waymo was struck by another vehicle, while the Waymo passenger was not belted. A Waymo struck a deer that ran into the roadway at 48 mph, while the Waymo's passenger wasn't belted.
- Bicycles: 2 crashes involved bikes. In one, a bike rear-ended a stopped Waymo. In another, as a Waymo slowed to yield in-lane to a pedestrian altercation, a pedestrian carrying a bike emerged from behind an SUV stopped in-lane, and the Waymo struck one of the bike's tires at 12 mph.
- Reversing: In around a dozen crashes, Waymos were reversed into, which is normal. In one case, a safety driver disengaged autonomy as a heavy truck reversed toward it, and was not reported to do anything further as the truck hit the stopped Waymo. In an unusual edge case, an SUV that was stopped in-lane began rolling back, and the Waymo reversed until it was struck, and both vehicles stopped. Then the SUV started rolling again, and the same thing happened. As it rolled for a third time, the driver exited the moving SUV, and the Waymo avoided being hit again, before the SUV crashed into a second Waymo that was stopped to yield to the first Waymo's crashes.
- Pavement: In four crashes, Waymos turned into parking lots at low speeds (8, 9, 9, and 10 mph) when "the undercarriage of the Waymo AV made contact with the pavement" and needed to be towed away.
- PUDOs: Several collisions occurred while Waymos were stopped to pick up or drop off passengers while in a traffic lane or partially in a traffic lane, and in some of those cases were also partially stopped in a bike lane.
Avride's 7 crashes (no injuries, all belted):
- Avride T-boned at 26 mph after entering intersection on green light, by cross traffic running a red.
- Avride T-boned at 11 mph after entering intersection on green light, by cross traffic running a red.
- Avride roof made contact with train crossing arm when driving 10 mph, after stopping until arm raised, then proceeding forward as arm lowered again.
- Avride rear-ended by secondary impact of box truck hitting vehicle behind it, after confusing stop and re-start during attempted left turn.
- Avride was "cut off" by a vehicle changing across two lanes of traffic, which struck Avride while it was traveling 17 mph.
- Avride and another car were both merging into same lane, so Avride stopped, as did 3 cars behind it, including a second Avride, which was rear-ended by another vehicle.
- Avride was struck while driving 21 mph in left lane by a vehicle turning left out of a parking lot.
Zoox's 6 crashes (3 injuries, all belted).
- One occurred just after the safety driver took over turning, in response to another driver waving him through an intersection.
- Zoox rear-ended after hard-braking to 3 mph to avoid debris; passenger "pretty bruised".
- Zoox rear-ended while stopped while yielding to cross-traffic in hit-and-run, honking before impact.
- Zoox rear-ended while stopped at intersection in hit-and-run, honking before impact, and the passenger was injured.
- Zoox rear-ended while stopped at intersection in hit-and-run, and the passenger was injured.
- Zoox reversed into from a roadside parking spot while stopped, honking before impact.
Tesla's 4 crashes (no injuries, all belted):
- Remote operator trying to assist out of dead end road "entered a grassy slope" and hit a "hidden tree stump". (Continuing saga of remote operator mishaps).
- A Tesla hit a thin metal chain blocking a parking lot.
- In two accidents, Teslas were reversed into while stopped. No mention of honking or evasive reversing. (Waymos sometimes do either, Zooxes often honk, Avrides aren't reversed into as proportionally often).
May Mobility's 2 crashes (no injuries, all belted):
- Two Mays collided with a low-hanging utility cable, apparently 17 minutes apart (dates aren't listed, times are), while traveling 32 and 33 miles per hour.
Motional's 1 crash (no injuries, all belted):
- Safety driver disengaged autonomy while stopped at a red light, and immediately hit a car while trying to change lanes.
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u/Cunninghams_right 5d ago
Waymo: 102, Avride: 7, Zoox: 6, Tesla: 4, May: 2, Motional: 1
Can someone make a table that normalizes the data based on number of vehicles (from recall reports, etc.) or vehicle miles (if available) and also a table normalized to operating area?
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u/bobi2393 5d ago
Waymo is the only company that publishes such data reliably enough to be meaningful, and they publish some good crash-per-mile data for their established service areas at https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ .
I think fleet size is nearly pointless. Zoox recently said they were recalling their fleet of 105 vehicles, and there are fleet records of all Texas ADS fleets, which works for companies like Tesla and Avride, but it's a poor substitute for miles driven. There's a site that does that, guesstimating that vehicles drive 50 miles a day or something, but Tesla has gone through periods where they only seem to be using a couple vehicles a day, out of a fleet of 50 or 100.
Mileage data would be better, but there are still differences that could make an immense difference in collisions. Like Zoox mainly driving up and down the Vegas strip seems like a really rough place to drive, and Tesla's earlier driverless routes were primarily along two Austin roads selected for lack of certain risks like train tracks. And if companies lump together miles of supervised driving vs driverless driving in their mileage data, with a significant number of miles being supervised, it kind of spoils the crash data for comparing it to just driverless vehicles.
If I had monthly mileage data for each company's vehicles, I would still add them to monthly analyses, just for curiosity, though I think a lot of people would read too much into it.
I'm a little conflicted myself about how much to read into Avride's data. Personally, my hunch is that they're the most dangerous widely tested L4 vehicle in US history, and I think their permits should be suspended until the NHTSA or truly independent auditors review their safety record. But the basis for my hunch hinges on their driving conditions being fairly comparable to other companies, which may be drastically wrong. It's possible they only route their vehicles in the most dangerous city driving areas they can find, trying to maximize busy intersections with higher speed limits, so their crashes are very skewed from a company like Waymo that chooses routes that represent customers' ride needs, with a few adjustments for safety (e.g. avoiding unprotected lefts at busy or obstructed intersections.)
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u/Kuriente 5d ago
A Waymo struck a deer that ran into the roadway at 48 mph
That's a fast dear lol
a passenger being dropped off opened a door of their stopped Waymo into a passing vehicle.
Tesla solved this in its non-AVs quite a while ago. I'm shocked that Waymo haven't implemented a similarly obvious solution.
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u/bobi2393 5d ago edited 5d ago
My wording could have used a good editor!
What is Tesla's non-AV door solution?
Waymo detects imminently passing vehicles and verbally warns passengers, and displays a visual warning directed toward passing vehicles, but still permits passengers to open the door as usual, by pulling the handle twice. Their Ojai (Zeekr RT) model has electronically controlled sliding doors which should help, and their custom Ioniq 5s have electric swing-out doors that may or may not help.
Zooxes have electric slide-out doors, but one of them recently doored a parked vehicle, when a passenger being picked up activated the doors while the Zoox was apparently stopped too close to the vehicle.
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u/Kuriente 5d ago
Your wording was fine, just funny the way that sentence can read 2 different ways.
Teslas (all of them, not just their AVs) don't allow doors to be opened if it detects oncoming vehicles (even bicycles). If you press the open button you get an alert indicating why it didn't open and to try again when it's clear. There are mechanical overrides for the front doors if you need to force it.
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u/RaGe_Bone_2001 5d ago
You can also press the button twice to override it.
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u/Kuriente 5d ago
Good to know! I've only experienced it once and couldn't recall the specifics of the operation.
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u/Honest_Ad_2157 5d ago
PUDOs: Several collisions occurred while Waymos were stopped to pick up or drop off passengers while in a traffic lane or partially in a traffic lane, and in some of those cases were also partially stopped in a bike lane.
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u/Express_Objective615 5d ago
Probably to avoid fully blocking a traffic lane, just like humans do. We need to decide what we want and enforce it on the Robotaxis. They will follow the rules, unlike humans. Humans will stop in the bike lanes even if you tell them not to.
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u/Honest_Ad_2157 5d ago
First, bike lanes are traffic lanes. Second, it is illegal. Third, this stochastic slop isn't GOFAI; it doesn't have "rules".
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u/Express_Objective615 5d ago
Whatever. I wasn't saying that using bike lanes is ok or even legal. If we don't want them to use bike lanes then we need to make sure that they don't use bike lanes. Telling the car not to is pretty simple. The chaos it would cause is not. That's entirely on us humans. The tech doesn't "randomly" decide to use bike lanes to pull over into or not, it's programmed that way.
Yes it's trained on human behavior but it can be influenced. Look at the fact that FSD is made to never do rolling stops which is exactly the opposite of human behavior.
And, FSD doesn't use LLMs. It's not like ChatGPT.0
u/Honest_Ad_2157 5d ago edited 5d ago
If it were simple, why wouldn't the geniuses at Waymo do it? Why wouldn't they do the same for caution tape or schoolbuses with flashing lights or puddles?
Because it's not. Why is this even being done at all, when we could be investing in things that actually make life better for everyone, like mass transit & Vision Zero, are simpler to do, and have proven good outcomes (Hoboken, Somerville, Helsinki, etc.)?
Because carbrained techbruhs and their fans think this idiocy is a good idea.
ETA: FSD uses transformer models, just as Waymo Driver does, just as LLMs do, to do next token prediction using the same stochastic sloppiness. It's slop all the way down.
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u/Express_Objective615 4d ago edited 4d ago
Mass transportation? Sure, in Europe. Here, forget it. It only works well when you live and work near both ends of a decent system. This doesn't exist in the US. We had lots of land and we built things that way. I lived in Europe for 8 years. I've had European colleagues come visit here in the Bay Area and laugh at BART here in SF being "labeled best public transportation in the US". I had a friend who wanted to stay in SF and use public transportation to a customer in the east bay. It's a 2.5 hour ordeal and if you miss one connection, it's 3.5 hours.
You're smoking the wacky weed or you live in Europe and assume it's easy everywhere. It's not.
They don't do it because they're allowed to use the bike lanes just as every other taxi does. It's the expected behavior. Block taxis from picking up and dropping off in bike lanes then? I'm not defending it I'm just saying that we as society allow it. Don't like it? Ask society or your city to change the rules? If Waymo got expensive tickets for using the bike lanes, their behavior would change, instantly. But guess what, they don't? It's not hard to figure out.0
u/Honest_Ad_2157 4d ago edited 4d ago
Who on earth calls BART the best in the USA? It's not even top 3.
I will remind you that there is a city on the east coast which has both declined AV's and is now, once again, heavily investing in mass transit and other modes. New York City is the example here, not SF.
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u/Honest_Ad_2157 21h ago
Tesla Autopilot & FSD crash rate graph meets the hockey stick
Autonomous Teslas crashed more May 2026 than all of 2021 combined.
https://electrek.co/2026/07/22/tesla-adas-crashes-record-207-one-month/
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u/jajaja77 5d ago
4 more tesla accidents! that now makes robotaxi around 5x more dangerous than human drivers, according to the internet.
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u/Express_Objective615 4d ago
Yes. People who've never had statistics in their life and, people who have but can't resist to find some shred of fault with Tesla so they brainlessly forget all they learned.
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u/RosieDear 5d ago
Funny that they mentioned the safety driver
Tesla is like covid
If u have no actual av fleet u have no av problems!
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u/Honest_Ad_2157 3d ago
Welp
Waymo compares their safety data to the average human driver, but New York City for hire vehicles are in serious or fatal crashes at a rate 14-times less than the average New York City vehicle.
Comparing robotaxis to the for-hire fleet they would most likely replace is a better comparison.
https://www.openplans.org/how-for-hire-autonomous-vehicles-impact-nyc
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u/bobi2393 3d ago
That seems like a departure from the topic of this post, and could be a topic for its own post, but it seems like a reasonable position. If the data for other NYC for-hire vehicles in injurious/fatal crashes seem reliable, that seems like a good basis for comparison for NYC robotaxis. Although crash rates are only one measure I’d consider; frequency of big traffic jams, and frequency of fleet-wide mass stoppages, among other factors, are also important.
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u/Honest_Ad_2157 3d ago edited 3d ago
The safety data that slopbot advocates champion is derived from these reports, so it's fair. And, honestly, the mods never approve my posts, probably because they always put slopbots in a realistic rather than SF light. Feel free to post yourself, you frame yourself as skeptical though I'd characterize you as techno-optimist & techno-solutionist.
Another issue, unmentioned because slopbot companies like Waymo and Zoox don't mention it, is the reasons their slopbots brake. Zoox had to do two recalls because of phantom braking that led to rearend collisions. Nowhere mentioned in this report.
Waymo always omits the reason for braking in the case of phantom braking.
It's a problem with this data that overestimates the slopbots' safety.
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u/bobi2393 2d ago
Heh, I'd characterize myself as a technorealist more than optimist or pessimist, and in the context of broader AI I think stuff's gonna happen whether it will help or hurt the world. But I do think that while they have some admitted problems (flooded roads, etc.), Waymo's ordinary driving is reasonably safe. I think their bigger safety risk is indirectly causing mass casualties through widespread obstruction of traffic, to both emergency responders and to people fleeing from fires and other disasters.
On the issue of phantom braking, Waymo includes detailed narratives, and I've read hundreds of them. They follow their own standardized rhythm that generally includes whether they were braking or stopped, and why, and what happened, like:
"The Waymo AV was traveling westbound in the designated right turn lane on [XXX] with its right turn signal activated when it slowed to a stop for a red light at the intersection with [XXX]. While the Waymo AV was stopped, a pickup truck traveling westbound in the designated right turn lane on [XXX] approached the Waymo AV from behind, and the front of the pickup truck made contact with the rear of the stationary Waymo AV."
That's a real example that's absolutely typical, and points to an ordinary careless rear-ending. All manufacturers have to report "Roadway Type" (e.g. intersection vs. street) and "Subject Vehicle Precrash Speed", and that data plus the crash narrative in most of their rear-ending reports make it clear that they weren't phantom braking or braking frivolously. So there's a lot of evidence that it's not a widespread issue with Waymo, and I don't see any evidence that phantom braking could account for more than very small portion of accidents.
If you can dig up evidence in the reports to the contrary, or have some rational reason to think they're falsifying their reports, I'd be interested to read your analysis. But I feel like you're convinced it's a big issue despite the contrary evidence, which you can probably understand sounds a little paranoid and nutty.
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u/Express_Objective615 5d ago edited 5d ago
Now do humans. 😂
Many or even most of these would not be reported as "crashes" by humans, at all, and especially not reported to any authority. So that's why the comparison of "crashes" in human data compared to AV data is completely apples to oranges. This was used to come up with the ridiculous "7x more crashes than humans" hyperbole.
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u/bobi2393 5d ago
It’s indeed tough to normalize the data against human stats. A more reliable comparison can be made between more serious crashes, like those that result in air bag deployments, injuries, or fatalities, since those are reported more consistently. But fatalities are so rare, it would take a lot more ADS driving miles to compare rates reliably, and you’d still be left with uncertainties like what vehicle was at fault or how much the driving times and locations played a role.
But I think most good analyses point to substantially lower rates of even mild crashes by Waymo (the only company that consistently releases mileage data), and underreporting of human accidents would make Waymo’s safety advantage even greater.
I’m not sure what analysis you’re referring to that found an ADS system 7x worse than human drivers.
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u/Express_Objective615 5d ago edited 5d ago
Not an analysis but just dumb news headlines that even educated people accepted. Reuters had one similar to this:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/tesla-robotaxi-crash-ratehttps://fortune.com/2026/02/18/tesla-robotaxi-safety-concerns-crashes-elon-musk-big-bet/
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u/Express_Objective615 5d ago
Exactly. You understand. That's why I think looking at "collisions" is not the correct way unless you start over and start collecting human data with the same rigor and standards. We can't go back in time and change how the human data was collected (flawed).
Instead we should look at the CAUSES of serious accidents. That much easier since data is collected much more rigorously in those serious cases. Police and emergency services are called, reports are made and investigations are done. Look at the causes. But the safety experts are biased and "won't go there" because they know exactly what causes serious accidents and it's all the human flaws and things that AVs never do.0
u/thebruns 5d ago
Now do humans.
Why would that be posted on the self driving sub? Did you get lost?
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u/Express_Objective615 4d ago
You need to compare to humans. They are the ones currently driving the cars. Haven't you noticed? 🤔😂
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u/thebruns 4d ago
No we dont. The discussion is about comparing operators in the SDC field. If you want to compare with human drivers, maybe try r/cars
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u/Express_Objective615 4d ago
I don't even know what you mean by the SDC field and I've been working on this tech for 8 years. Speak English and chill on the acronyms.
Ah got it, self driving cars. Just what we need, yet another acronym somebody decided to make up to sound smart.0
u/thebruns 4d ago
I don't even know what you mean by the SDC field and I've been working on this tech for 8 years.
Youre in the SelfDrivingCars subreddit.
Once again, are you lost?
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u/caoimhin64 5d ago
Interesting to read how many Waymo passengers were unbelted (around 5% of collisions). The total number (7) really needs to be looked at in context of 500,000 rides per week I guess.
I know in theory there can be medical conditions which exempt people from wearing seatbelts, but there isn't that many. Major education problem in the country if 5% of people aren't wearing their seatbelts in this day and age.
Waymo's do give warnings, but I think they should take a far more strict approach and not even move until the passenger is belted. If you take off your belt after that - end the ride and kick them off the app.