Tesla has filed four new Robotaxi crash reports with NHTSA, with the most significant involving a remote operator driving a Model Y into a tree stump in Houston — and the first time Tesla has formally coded remote operation in a federal filing1,2.
The Houston incident, report 13781-15395, occurred in May. According to Tesla's narrative filed with NHTSA, the Model Y "was stopped on a dead end residential road" when it needed help getting out. "While the ADS was being supported remotely out of the dead end road, the vehicle entered a grassy slope," Tesla wrote. "As the remote assistance operator continued to recover the vehicle, they made contact with a hidden tree stump".
The crash caused property damage only — no injuries, no airbag deployment, no tow — at a pre-crash speed of 2 mph. Tesla listed the Driver/Operator Type as "Remote (Commercial / Test)," the first time it has used that designation in any of its 22 unique ADS incident reports. Every other Tesla filing either leaves that field blank or lists an in-vehicle operator.
The Houston crash is the third collision Tesla has reported involving a human operating the car remotely. In January 2026, a Tesla teleoperator took over and drove a car into a temporary construction barricade at 9 mph, and in July 2025, a teleoperator took control, accelerated, turned left, and drove a car up a curb into a metal fence at 8 mph. Neither of those earlier incidents was formally coded as remote operation in the NHTSA filing.
The four new reports span Tesla's active Robotaxi markets. Austin produced two crashes in the batch, with roughly 16 active Tesla cars operating there. Houston and Dallas each produced one crash. Tesla had three active vehicles in Houston and seven in Dallas, according to Robotaxi Tracker data cited by Electrek. The Dallas report, 13781-15399, was Tesla's first crash report in that city.
Among the Austin filings, report 13781-15342 was filed as a 5-Day report rather than a monthly report and was the only one of the four where the Tesla was towed. That report involved one passenger who was aboard and belted. The other Austin report, 13781-15400, involved a Tesla following a construction truck through a narrowed street coded as a work zone.
The filings surface a contrast with Waymo's stated approach to remote assistance. Waymo said in a February 2026 letter to Senator Ed Markey that it has not used remote driving or tele-operations where a human performs the Dynamic Driving Task. Waymo said its remote assistance agents do not directly control, steer, or drive the vehicle, and that a specially trained US-based event response agent can prompt a stuck vehicle to move forward at 2 mph at fixed steering angles to exit a travel lane — a function Waymo said has never been used outside of training.
ANALYSIS The formal coding of remote operation in the Houston filing marks a transparency shift in Tesla's NHTSA reporting, given that two prior crashes attributed to remote operators were not coded as such in their respective filings. The structured data field now gives regulators a clearer signal of when a remote human — rather than the autonomous system or an in-vehicle safety driver — was performing the driving task at the time of a collision.
Tesla had previously argued it would suffer financial harm if its crash narratives became public but reversed course and made those narratives available in a May data release.