The City of Austin is reporting robotaxi traffic incidents with daily updates. Waymo has about ten times the number of vehicles and double the driving area as Tesla in Austin. Waymo has been operating since March and Tesla since June 22.
Waymo has 12 incidents in June and July and Tesla has had 1 incident. This data is current up to July 3 2025. Seven safety incidents for Waymo versus 1 for Tesla.
Waymo had two blocking traffic incidents and 3 Nuisance incidents in the Austin in June.
This can be seen where there were consistent problems with Waymo for multiple pickups and dropoffs at the popular restaurant Terry Black. The Waymo did not go into the parking lot but blocked one of two lanes of traffic along the road.
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Ok let’s normalize by car numbers: 12 with 10 times more cars it means 1.2 accidents if waymo had the same number of cars than Tesla, but considering June + July for waymo while Tesla started only June 22nd requires further normalisation considering 35 days for waymo and 13 for Tesla. So waymo operated roughly 3times more,so if we normalize for time we get 1.2 / 3 or 0.4 accidents for waymo compared to 1 for Tesla. If we also normalize for area (assuming the bigger the area covered the more problems you can encounter) since waymo covers twice the area we gave to divide by 2 so 0.4 / 2 is 0.2 compared to 1 Tesla accident. So waymo is 5 times safer despite Tesla having safety operators that can take over to prevent accidents.
My husband works for Waymo. These vehicles are learning all the time. Excellent breakdown on the statics, by the way. Thanks!
There’s also data here we don’t have. Number of cars on the road doesn’t equate to number of total hours on the road. Tesla Robotaxi is in a very limited closed beta, so most of those cars probably aren’t doing anything right now, after all the influencers in the program flew back home.
Also worth noting is that this isn’t counting accidents, it’s counting “incidents”. Waymo has 12 “blocking traffic” incidents
Waymo had two collisions in Austin during the second half testing period and one collision in July. Tesla has had zero collisions. 19 blocking incidents. 25 safety incidents. Tesla has had one safety incident (an almost fender bender where a UPS driver would have backed into the Tesla when the Tesla was going to park.
In terms of actual accidents. Waymo has had 3 and Tesla has had zero in Austin. My latest article compares the number of vehicle days in operation for each and over each testing periods.