NHTSA Opens Probe Into Uber Robotaxi Partner Avride After 16 Crashes in Four Months on Dallas Streets
Federal regulators flagged 16 crashes involving Avride's Hyundai Ioniq 5 robotaxis between December 2025 and March 2026, citing 'excessive assertiveness and insufficient capability.'
Editor's Note ·
- Clarification:
- whbl.com is not currently on the project's source_allowlist. It is a Wisconsin radio station that republishes Reuters wire copy; the Reuters content quoted (Avride's 'targeted technical and operational mitigations' statement) was verified verbatim against the local snapshot during review. Adding whbl.com (or, more usefully, the canonical reuters.com) to config/source_allowlist.txt is recommended.
Overview
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a preliminary evaluation of Avride on May 8, 2026, after identifying 16 crashes in four months involving the Uber partner’s self-driving Hyundai Ioniq 5 fleet in Texas, according to TechCrunch and a Reuters wire report. The agency’s Office of Defects Investigation said the vehicles’ performance pattern may indicate “excessive assertiveness and insufficient capability” and “may also constitute traffic safety violations,” as reported by The Next Web.
What We Know
The 16 crashes occurred between December 2025 and March 2026, with most reported in Dallas and some in Austin, according to TechCrunch and The Next Web. NHTSA said the incidents involved 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, as detailed by The Next Web.
One minor injury was recorded. In December 2025, an Avride-equipped Hyundai Ioniq 5 clipped the open driver’s side door of a parked pickup truck, per TechCrunch. A separate Dallas incident saw an Avride vehicle attempt to change lanes around a parked pickup truck and turn into a van beside it; at least one other crash involved a collision with a dumpster, TechCrunch reported.
A trained safety operator was on board during every crash, according to TechCrunch. In only one of the 16 reported crashes did the safety monitor attempt to intervene, The Next Web noted.
Avride launched its passenger robotaxi service in a nine-square-mile section of downtown Dallas on 3 December 2025, and operates some of those vehicles on the Uber platform under a partnership announced in October 2024, The Next Web reported. Uber and Avride committed up to 375 million dollars to scale the fleet to 500 vehicles, the same outlet reported. The Reuters wire account places the current fleet at around 200 vehicles, with dozens more being added each month, per WHBL/Reuters.
In its response, Avride said “Our total operations have continued to grow, while the frequency of incidents relative to our mileage has steadily declined,” according to TechCrunch. The company also said it had “implemented targeted technical and operational mitigations to address our findings from each reported incidents,” as quoted by WHBL/Reuters.
Avride is a subsidiary of Nebius, the Amsterdam-based technology company that emerged from the restructuring of Yandex NV after the Russian internet giant sold its domestic business in 2024, and inherited Yandex’s self-driving technology, which had been in development since 2017, The Next Web reported.
What We Don’t Know
NHTSA has not yet specified what enforcement action, if any, may follow the preliminary evaluation. The agency’s next step is typically an engineering analysis or a formal recall request, but neither outcome is guaranteed and timelines vary widely. None of the cited sources provided a complete crash-by-crash breakdown beyond the headline examples, nor did they indicate whether the investigation extends to crashes in Austin separately from those in Dallas.
It is also unclear how the probe will affect the Uber-Avride scaling plan toward 500 vehicles, or whether the safety-operator requirement will change while the investigation proceeds.