Launching AutoPilotWatch: Every Autonomous Vehicle Crash in America, Exposed

There are 6,215 autonomous vehicle crashes in NHTSA's mandatory reporting database. 68 people are dead. Tesla alone accounts for 3,092 of those incidents and 56 of those deaths. And yet, until now, there has been no single place where you could search, analyze, and understand all of this data. We built AutoPilotWatch to fix that.

The Problem: Scattered Data, No Accountability

In 2021, NHTSA began requiring manufacturers to report any crash involving autonomous driving systems. The data is published as raw CSV files on a government server. No search. No analysis. No context. If you want to know how many people Tesla's Autopilot has killed, you have to download bulk files and parse them yourself.

Meanwhile, the sites that do exist are deeply limited:

• tesladeaths.com tracks fatalities only — no crash data, no analysis, manually updated
• NHTSA's own portal offers raw CSV downloads with no search or visualization
• Manufacturer safety reports (Tesla, Waymo) are self-reported and cherry-picked
• Law firm sites have analysis but exist to generate legal leads, not inform the public

Nobody has built a comprehensive, manufacturer-agnostic platform that cross-references crash reports, consumer complaints, recalls, and NHTSA investigations into one searchable database. That's what AutoPilotWatch does.

What We Built

AutoPilotWatch pulls from six federal data sources — NHTSA's Standing General Order crash reports (both ADS and ADAS), the consumer complaints database, the recalls database, the investigations database, Technical Service Bulletins, and vehicle safety ratings. We cross-reference all of it.

Every Manufacturer, Every Model

We track 60 manufacturers and 100+ vehicle models with AV/ADAS crash reports. Each gets a detailed profile with incident counts, severity breakdowns, trends over time, and comparisons to peers. Tesla dominates with 49.8% of all reports. Waymo is second at 27.8% — though with a radically different safety profile (2 fatalities vs. Tesla's 56).

Searchable Incident Database

Every one of the 6,215 crash reports is individually searchable by manufacturer, vehicle, state, city, severity, weather conditions, and speed. Each incident has its own detail page with the full NHTSA narrative, crash circumstances, and related incidents.

13 Interactive Tools

We built tools that let anyone explore the data:

• VIN Safety Lookup — Check if your vehicle is under investigation or recall
• Manufacturer Safety Scorecard — Side-by-side safety comparisons
• Route Risk Checker — AV incident history for any US city
• FSD Version Tracker — Which software versions crash most
• Recall Checker — Search recalls by make/model/year
• Crash Rate Calculator — Compare AV vs. human crash rates
• Safety Quiz — Test your knowledge of AV safety data
• Plus compare models, incident search, cost calculator, narrative search, and more

25+ Data-Driven Analysis Articles

We wrote deep dives into the data that nobody else has published:

• AV vs. human crash rates — are self-driving cars actually safer?
• The phantom braking epidemic — Tesla's #1 complaint
• Geographic risk hotspots — where AV crashes cluster
• Speed and severity analysis — how fast were they going?
• The reporting gap — what manufacturers aren't telling NHTSA
• Emergency vehicle crashes — a disturbing pattern
• Highway bias — why most AV deaths happen on highways

What the Data Actually Shows

Some findings from our analysis:

• Tesla accounts for 82.3% of all fatalities in the NHTSA AV crash database (56 of 68)
• Average crash speed is 36 mph — these aren't just parking lot fender benders
• Clear weather dominates — 57% of crashes happen in clear conditions, undermining the "bad weather" excuse
• Peak crash time is 3-5 PM — rush hour, when the roads are most complex
• Waymo has 1,729 incidents but only 2 fatalities — suggesting very different safety characteristics between robotaxis and consumer ADAS
• AV crash reports are accelerating — monthly incident counts have trended upward since 2021

Why This Matters Now

NHTSA has 3.2 million Tesla vehicles under active investigation — one step from mandatory recall. Tesla's robotaxi is launching amid unresolved safety probes. And the regulatory landscape is a patchwork: some states have no AV laws at all, while others require human safety drivers.

The public deserves access to the actual data — not Tesla's self-reported safety statistics, not law firm marketing, not government CSV dumps. AutoPilotWatch makes the real data searchable, understandable, and impossible to ignore.

Part of TheDataProject.AI

AutoPilotWatch is our 21st public data platform, joining:

• WarCosts — Every American war from the Revolution to Iran 2026
• OpenCrime — FBI crime data for 9,700+ cities
• AI Exposure — AI job displacement risk for 925 occupations
• ShelterScope — Housing affordability data for 373 metros
• GiveScope — Financial intelligence for 1.9M nonprofits
• SPACGraveyard — Where $363 billion in SPAC money went to die

Explore AutoPilotWatch

Visit autopilotwatch.com to search every AV crash in America, explore manufacturer safety profiles, check if your vehicle is affected, and read data-driven analysis that holds the self-driving industry accountable.

AutoPilotWatch is built by TheDataProject.AI — making public data usable, searchable, and accessible to everyone.