The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has launched an investigation into Avride, a robo-taxi company that has partnered with Uber, after finding more than a dozen accidents and one minor injury.
The safety regulator’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) said all 16 crashes it found were related to the “competence” of Avride’s self-driving system, which apparently has difficulty changing lanes, responding to other vehicles in the same lane and responding to stationary objects.
All accidents occurred while the Avride vehicles were under the supervision of a safety monitor in the driver’s seat. Reached for comment, Avride declined to explain why the safety monitors did not intervene in those crashes. The company noted that it reported these accidents to NHTSA as required by the agency’s 2021 standing order on automated driving.
“We have implemented targeted technical and operational mitigations to address our findings from each reported incident between December 2025 and March 2026 and have further improved overall system capabilities,” the company said in a statement. “Our overall business has continued to grow, while the frequency of incidents relative to our mileage has steadily decreased.”
Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Avride, known for its curbside delivery robots, is a subsidiary of Nebius, formerly Yandex NV, the Netherlands-based company that sold its Russian business in 2024. The company has also spent years developing and testing self-driving cars and partnered with Uber in 2024. Nebius and its parent company, the following year. agreed to make “strategic investments and other commitments” to Avride worth up to $375 million.
The investigation comes just months after Uber began offering Avride robotaxis rides in Dallas, Texas, where “many of the reported accidents have occurred,” according to the ODI. Some of the crashes also occurred in Austin, Texas. At least one of the reported accidents involved a robotaxi carrying a passenger.
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The research comes amid extensive testing, development and scaling of autonomous vehicle technologies by many companies across the United States, with increased scrutiny.
Waymo is currently being investigated by both NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board for illegal behavior around school buses and an accident in January in which one of Alphabet’s robotic machines struck a child.
The ODI said on Friday that it had completed its preliminary examination of the videos of each Avride crash. Those videos, according to the bureau, show “instances of AVs changing lanes en route or directly into other vehicles traveling in an adjacent lane and in close proximity to an AV. They do not slow or stop for slow-moving or stopped vehicles in the lane and path ahead.
The accident that caused a minor injury happened in December 2025 in Dallas, according to data filed with NHTSA. It involved an Avride-equipped Hyundai Ioniq 5 smashing open the driver’s side door of a parked truck. One of the truck’s occupants suffered minor injuries that did not require treatment.
Another December crash in Dallas involved an Avride robot taxi that tried to change lanes to avoid a parked truck, according to data filed with NHTSA. The Avride vehicle rolled into a van next to it, causing damage to both vehicles.
Multiple accidents involved other vehicles being transformed into the Avride robotaxis, although it is unclear from the descriptions if there was any chance the robotaxis could avoid these collisions. At least one accident involved an Avride vehicle hitting a dumpster. Only one of the reported crashes describes the security monitor trying to intervene.
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