Tesla Releases Detailed Safety Report After Waymo Co-CEO Called for More Data

Tesla has released its most detailed safety report to date, providing a rare glimpse into how its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software performs on public roads. The move comes just weeks after Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana publicly called for more transparency from companies testing advanced driver-assistance systems.

In a new section on its website, Tesla claims that in North America, drivers using its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system experience a major collision every 5 million miles and a minor collision every 1.5 million miles.

According to Tesla’s interpretation of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data, the U.S. national averages are one major collision every 699,000 miles and one minor collision every 229,000 miles—meaning Tesla’s software appears to perform significantly better than human drivers.

Tesla has long published quarterly safety updates;  however, these reports have been widely criticised as being too limited. The company also released almost no public data about the safety performance of its Robotaxi trial in Austin, Texas, which still includes human safety drivers.

By comparison, Waymo, the leading robotaxi operator in the U.S., has published extensive safety statistics, showing that its vehicles are roughly five times safer than human drivers and twelve times safer for pedestrians.

At TechCrunch Disrupt last month, Mawakana was asked which companies she believed were making roads safer.
“I don’t know who’s on that list, because they’re not telling us what’s happening with their fleets,” she said.
She added that companies deploying vehicles without drivers have “a responsibility to be transparent” about their safety data, emphasising, “If you are not being transparent, you are not doing what is necessary to actually earn the right to make the road safer.”

Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Tesla’s new disclosures meet that standard.

Tesla’s updated report separates data for Autopilot—its older, highway-focused system—and Full Self-Driving (Supervised), which is designed for more complex environments but still requires driver oversight.

According to the company, FSD users average 2.9 million miles per major collision, while Autopilot drivers average 5 million miles per major collision. In contrast, NHTSA data shows that all U.S. drivers average 505,000 miles per major collision. For minor collisions, FSD users average 986,000 miles, compared to the national average of 178,000 miles.

Tesla also disclosed, for the first time, how it defines these terms. The company uses the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (49 C.F.R. § 563.5) definition, classifying “major collisions” as crashes involving airbag deployment or other “non-reversible pyrotechnic restraints.”

Crucially, Tesla states that any crash occurring within five seconds of FSD being active is included in the dataset, even if the driver disengaged the system moments before impact.
“This calculation ensures our reported collision rates for FSD (Supervised) capture not only collisions that occur while the system is actively controlling the vehicle, but also scenarios where a driver may disengage the system or where the system aborts on its own shortly before impact,” Tesla said.

The company stated that it will update the data quarterly, using a rolling 12-month aggregation to reflect current performance trends. Tesla noted that it will not release additional information, such as injury rates, citing limitations on the automatic collection of data.
“Instead, Tesla focuses on objective and programmatic metrics such as collision frequency and airbag deployment rates. Airbag deployments serve as a reliable proxy for collision severity,” the company wrote.