DEPLOYDatabase

Safety record

Tesla safety record

26 incidents on file for Tesla, rolled up across its models and deployments (operated or manufactured). Each entry below is individually sourced and dated; retracted claims are excluded from this count but remain reachable at their own canonical URLs.

← Back to Tesla

Machine-readable surfaces

Incidents

Exposure

DEPLOY does not have exposure data (deployment-hours, miles driven, or rides given) on file for Tesla's 10 recorded deployments. This is a genuine data gap, not a rounding to zero: no incident count above can be turned into a defensible rate without it. NHTSA's SGO dataset itself does not publish exposure denominators, and there is no standardized, regulator-verified nationwide source for AV fleet mileage or ride counts today. Where a company self-publishes a mileage figure, it is not independently audited and is not shown here as DEPLOY-verified data.

A note on NHTSA's crash-reporting data

Many of the incidents below are drawn from NHTSA's Standing General Order (SGO) 2021-01 crash-reporting program, which requires manufacturers and operators of automated driving systems (ADS) and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) to report qualifying crashes. It is the only nationwide, cross-operator crash dataset that exists for this industry, and it is also, by NHTSA's own design and Consumer Reports' public assessment, an imperfect one.

Reporting companies may redact narrative fields as confidential business information (CBI). In practice this means narrative completeness is uneven across manufacturers in the underlying dataset: some incident reports read as full prose descriptions of what happened, others are replaced with boilerplate redacted text. This is a property of the source data, not of DEPLOY's editorial process; DEPLOY publishes what the filing discloses and states plainly when a fuller account is not publicly available.

The SGO dataset also does not publish exposure denominators (miles driven, hours operated, rides given) alongside crash counts, so a raw incident count cannot be turned into a rate without an independently sourced denominator. See "Exposure" below for what DEPLOY does and does not have on file for this company.

Common questions

What is Tesla's safety record?
DEPLOY has 26 incidents on file for Tesla, drawn from NHTSA's Standing General Order crash-reporting program and press coverage. Each incident below is individually sourced and dated; see the incident list for details.
Is Tesla safer than a human driver?
DEPLOY does not have exposure data (miles driven or hours operated) on file for Tesla, so no per-mile or per-hour safety rate can be computed from this registry today. This is a documented industry-wide data gap, not unique to DEPLOY: NHTSA's own SGO dataset does not publish exposure denominators alongside crash counts. Any rate comparison you see elsewhere may rely on a company's self-published mileage figures, which are not independently audited.
Does DEPLOY redact or omit crash details for Tesla?
No. DEPLOY does not redact incident narratives. Where a source narrative is itself incomplete (for example, a NHTSA SGO filing redacted as confidential business information), DEPLOY states that plainly rather than filling the gap. See "A note on NHTSA's crash-reporting data" below.

Full company record: Tesla