Tesla Autopilot Hits A Record 207 Crashes In A Single Month
Tesla reported 207 crashes involving its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in May 2026, the highest single-month total in the history of the NHTSA's Advanced Driver Assistance Systems crash reporting program. That one month is larger than Tesla's entire 2021 crash report total of 157.
The company now accounts for 85 percent of all ADAS crash reports in the NHTSA database, across 3,763 unique incidents since 2019.
The critical caveat that makes this hard to interpret: Tesla's fleet is much larger than it was in 2021, and drivers are using Autopilot and FSD on far more miles than before. Raw crash counts rise with fleet size and miles driven.
The problem is that no one outside Tesla can check whether the per-mile crash rate is improving or not, because Tesla does not publish independently auditable miles-driven data for its driver-assist systems.
The raw record alone cannot tell you whether FSD is getting safer per mile.
What Tesla does control, it largely blacks out. The company has redacted the crash narrative on 99.9 percent of its 3,763 reports, citing confidential business information, meaning the public file cannot separate Autopilot crashes from FSD crashes, cannot confirm severity in most cases and cannot determine what software version was running.
For comparison, GM, Ford, Honda and Toyota redact essentially none of their narratives. Tesla is also under a separate NHTSA probe for how it reports these crashes in the first place.
