The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a defect investigation into Avride, the autonomous vehicle company that partners with Uber, after identifying 16 crashes and one minor injury involving its robotaxis in Texas. The agency's Office of Defects Investigation said every crash it identified relates to the competence of Avride's self-driving system, which has struggled with changing lanes, responding to other vehicles in the same lane, and responding to stationary objects.
Investigators completed a preliminary review of video from each crash. The office reported seeing instances of the vehicles "changing lanes into the path of or directly into other vehicles traveling in an adjacent lane" and failing to slow or stop for slow moving or stopped vehicles in the lane ahead. At least one Avride vehicle struck a dumpster.
The crash that caused the injury happened in December 2025 in Dallas. An Avride-equipped Hyundai Ioniq 5 clipped the open driver's side door of a parked pickup truck, and one of the truck's occupants sustained a minor injury that did not require hospitalization. Every crash occurred while a safety monitor sat in the driver's seat, and only one report describes the monitor attempting to intervene. Avride declined to explain why the monitors stayed passive, and it said it reported the crashes as required under the agency's 2021 Standing General Order on automated driving.
Avride said in a statement that it has "implemented targeted technical and operational mitigations to address our findings from each reported incident between December 2025 and March 2026, and have further enhanced overall system capabilities." Uber began offering rides in Avride robotaxis in Dallas in December 2025, and additional crashes occurred in Austin. Waymo faces separate reviews from the same agency and from the National Transportation Safety Board.
Source: TechCrunch - https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/08/uber-partner-avride-is-under-investigation-for-self-driving-crashes/