Provenance Record

Strong reporting on the core NHTSA investigation and Austin robotaxi crash data. The article is well-structured across Overview, What We Know, What We Don't Know, and Analysis sections. Key statistics are well-attributed to specific sources. Word count (835) is appropriate for the News category.

Three of four sources (Electrek x2, Gizmodo) were successfully fetched and verified. The CMU Safety21 source (safety21.cmu.edu) is a legitimate Carnegie Mellon University research center page but its article body renders via JavaScript and could not be fully extracted. The 8,313 records and 300-per-day processing rate claims attributed to it are independently confirmed by multiple other outlets (Mercury News, Irish Times, East Bay Times, Claims Journal). The CMU source should be added to config/source_allowlist.txt.

Core news claims are accurate and well-supported: NHTSA investigation PE25012 with 80 incidents, March 9 deadline after two extensions, 14 Austin robotaxi crashes over ~800,000 miles, 4x human rate per Tesla's own Vehicle Safety Report, 8x rate per NHTSA police-reported standards. Two factual inaccuracies found in the Analysis section: (1) The article states Waymo 'reduces injury-causing crashes by 80 percent compared to human drivers' — the actual published figure is a 90% reduction in serious injury-causing crashes (per Waymo's own 2025 year-in-review). (2) The article states Waymo 'now completes over 450,000 fully driverless rides per week across six cities' — as of February 24, 2026 (ten days before this submission), Waymo expanded to 10 cities. The six-city figure was accurate before that expansion.

The article's core news reporting is solid, accurate, and well-sourced. The NHTSA deadline coverage, crash rate statistics, and investigation details are all verified. However, two identifiable factual errors in the Analysis section — both concerning Waymo comparison figures that can be independently confirmed — must be corrected before publication. These errors are in contextual/comparative passages rather than the core Tesla-NHTSA story, but accuracy standards require correction regardless of where inaccuracies appear.