Waymo's track record of over 200 million fully autonomous miles and 500,000 paid rides per week has inadvertently become the measuring stick exposing how far behind other robotaxi operators really are. While Waymo operates the largest and longest-running commercial robotaxi service with a safety record substantially better per mile than human drivers, competitors like Avride and Tesla are racking up crashes at alarming rates, revealing a dangerous gap in how the autonomous vehicle industry is being regulated in the United States.

The contrast is stark. Avride, Uber's autonomous vehicle partner, experienced 16 crashes in just four months after launching its robotaxi service in Dallas in December 2025, prompting the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to open an investigation. The regulator's assessment was blunt: the vehicles displayed "excessive assertiveness and insufficient capability," meaning they were programmed to act decisively in traffic but lacked the perception and decision-making quality to execute those actions safely.

What Happened When China Paused Robotaxi Licenses?

Earlier this year, China took dramatic action after dozens of autonomous vehicles from Baidu suddenly stopped in their tracks in Wuhan, causing major traffic chaos. The Chinese government responded by halting the issuance of new licenses for autonomous vehicles altogether, signaling a willingness to pump the brakes on the technology when safety concerns emerge. A similar incident occurred in San Francisco when a power outage caused Waymo's fleet to clog city streets, forcing the company to shut down service entirely.

Yet the United States has taken no comparable federal action. Instead of a coordinated national response, the country relies on a patchwork of state-by-state regulations with no federal autonomous vehicle safety law in place. A bipartisan House bill remains in draft form, and previous attempts at federal regulation have stalled.

Why Is the Safety Gap Between Operators So Wide?

The incidents involving Avride paint a troubling picture of what happens when companies deploy vehicles before they're ready. The 16 crashes involved Avride's fleet of Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicles changing lanes into the path of other cars, failing to slow or stop for slow-moving and stationary vehicles, and striking objects in the road. In only one of the 16 reported crashes did the safety monitor sitting in the driver's seat attempt to intervene. One crash in December 2025 resulted in a minor injury when an Avride vehicle clipped the open door of a parked pickup truck.

Tesla's robotaxi service in Austin has been involved in 14 crashes since launching, a rate that Electrek calculated at approximately four times worse than human drivers. NHTSA has escalated its investigation into 3.2 million Tesla vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving software, opening an engineering analysis that is a required step before a potential recall.

By comparison, Waymo's safety record, while not perfect, demonstrates what a mature autonomous vehicle operation looks like. The company operates 3,000 vehicles and has logged more than 200 million fully autonomous miles. This performance gap illustrates the range of capability among companies that are all legally permitted to operate on public roads.

How to Understand the Regulatory Vacuum in the U.S.

• State-by-State Patchwork: Autonomous vehicle regulations vary significantly by state, with no overarching federal safety standards or requirements that vehicles must meet before deployment.
• Reactive Rather Than Proactive: NHTSA's investigation into Avride was triggered by crash reports after the fact, not by pre-deployment safety standards that the vehicles failed to meet.
• Texas Permissiveness: Texas has some of the most permissive autonomous vehicle regulations in the United States, which is why multiple companies have chosen it as a launch market, but this permissiveness also means the regulatory response to safety failures is largely reactive.

California has recently introduced rules through its Department of Motor Vehicles that allow law enforcement to issue traffic citations to robotaxis, holding companies accountable for violating traffic laws. However, this represents a limited response focused on traffic violations rather than comprehensive safety oversight.

The absence of enforced federal safety rules has allowed the robotaxi industry to expand rapidly. According to Morgan Stanley estimates, the number of autonomous rides in the U.S. is expected to spike from 15 million last year to 36 million this year, with projections reaching nearly 750 million by 2030. As the industry grows, so could the number of incidents, and government data has shown that robotaxis are becoming a significant drain on public resources.

The platform model that Uber has adopted complicates accountability. Uber sold its autonomous technology in 2020 because the cost and liability of developing self-driving vehicles was unsustainable. The company now partners with multiple autonomous vehicle operators, including Avride, Wayve, Nuro, Volkswagen's MOIA, and Waymo, bearing the development cost and safety responsibility through these partners while Uber provides the demand. However, when an Avride vehicle changes lanes into a van in Dallas, the ride was booked through the Uber app, meaning Uber's brand and its passengers are exposed to the safety record of every partner it integrates.

The question now facing regulators is whether the current approach of allowing companies to operate and investigating only after crashes occur is sustainable. Waymo's success has raised the bar for what safe autonomous vehicle operation looks like, making the failures of other operators increasingly difficult to ignore. Without federal intervention similar to China's pause on new licenses, the U.S. may continue to see a widening gap between the safest operators and those deploying vehicles that are, by the NHTSA's own assessment, excessively assertive and insufficiently capable.

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