Tesla Robotaxi Fleet Expands in Texas Amid Fatal Crashes

Tesla has expanded its Texas robotaxi fleet by 50% in a single day. Recent fatal crashes in the state involved Tesla vehicles, with drivers reportedly manually overriding safety features before accidents. An elderly woman was killed in one such incident.

TSLA expanded its Texas robotaxi fleet by roughly 50% in a single day, registering dozens of additional Model Y vehicles and pushing the state's total well past 100 cars. The rapid, batched registration suggests Tesla is scaling deployment in meaningful increments rather than adding vehicles one at a time, even as the company still trails established robotaxi operators like Waymo in overall fleet size across Texas.

The expansion comes as the National Transportation Safety Board's investigation into a fatal Katy, Texas crash sharpened scrutiny of Tesla's driver-assistance systems. According to NTSB findings, the driver manually overrode Full Self-Driving by pressing the accelerator to 100%, reaching speeds over 70 mph on a residential road posted at 30 mph before striking a house and killing an elderly woman. Similar patterns of drivers overriding autonomous driving modes in the moments before a crash have surfaced in other recent incidents, reinforcing a recurring theme in Tesla's safety record: the technology is frequently disengaged, not malfunctioning, in the crashes drawing the most regulatory attention.

That distinction matters for how regulators and courts assign responsibility, but it does little to soften the reputational overhang for a company simultaneously trying to convince the public and state regulators that autonomous ride-hailing is safe enough to scale. The driver in the Katy crash has been charged with manslaughter, and a lawsuit naming both the driver and Tesla has already been filed, a combination that keeps Tesla's liability exposure and public safety narrative in the spotlight even as the robotaxi fleet grows.

What to watch: whether Texas or federal regulators respond to the crash pattern with new oversight of driver-override behavior or FSD marketing claims, and whether Tesla's fleet expansion pace continues to outrun rivals like Waymo and Avride, which still substantially outnumber Tesla's registered vehicles in the state.

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