The robotaxi market is once again under pressure after a series of incidents in the US. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has launched an investigation into Avride, a competitor to Tesla and an Uber partner in autonomous transportation. The reason for the investigation is 16 accidents over four months of service in Dallas and Austin.
According to the regulator, vehicles with autonomous driving systems made unsafe lane changes, collided with other cars, and exhibited unstable behavior even under the control of safety operators. In one instance, a person was injured, although no serious injuries were reported.
The peculiarity of this story is that Avride is not a "garage startup." The company grew out of Yandex's autonomous division technologies and today uses a fleet of Hyundai Ioniq 5s equipped with lidars, radars, and a set of surround-view cameras. The service is already integrated into the Uber app.
The problem emerged at a highly sensitive moment for the entire industry. Tesla is actively preparing to launch its own Robotaxi network, Waymo is expanding its service geography, and major automakers are investing billions of dollars in autonomous driving. But each new investigation amplifies regulators' main fear: even modern systems cannot yet guarantee predictable behavior in complex urban traffic.
Against this backdrop, the contrast with Waymo is particularly striking. The company already reports hundreds of millions of autonomous miles driven and significantly fewer accidents per distance. This is why the market is increasingly divided not into "autopilots" and ordinary cars, but into systems of different maturity levels.
The Avride story reveals an unpleasant trend for the industry: scaling robotaxis has proven much more difficult than demonstrating autonomous driving in controlled conditions.
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