By Adriano Marchese

The U.S. auto-safety watchdog is opening a probe into Avride's self-driving system after a series of Texas crashes suggested the technology may not be up to the task.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation has received multiple crash reports involving Avride automated vehicles operating in Dallas and Austin. In every case, the automated driving system was in control at the time.

Avride is an autonomous-vehicle company that develops self-driving cars and delivery robots, originally spun out of Yandex's self-driving division.

The crashes point to basic driving failures, including changing lanes into another vehicle, not slowing or stopping for stopped or slow vehicles ahead, not reacting to vehicles entering the lane and hitting stationary objects partially blocking the lane.

After analyzing footage from the crashes, the ODI said that the self-driving performance in these crashes suggest the self-driving system was acting unsafely, such as being overly bold or not skilled enough to handle normal driving situations, and possibly violating traffic rules.

The ODI has opened up the preliminary evaluation to investigate the performance in order to gauge the seriousness of the problems and assess the risks they pose to passengers and others on the road.

A preliminary evaluation is a first step in the NHTSA's investigation process from which it would proceed to an engineering analysis if any issue is found.

Self-driving cars are increasingly showing up in cities across the U.S. such as Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Dallas, where companies such as Waymo, Cruise, Amazon's Zoox and Avride are running robotaxis and delivery pilots. These autonomous vehicles are being used for ride-hailing, food delivery and limited autonomous shuttle services as companies test how these systems perform in real world traffic.

Write to Adriano Marchese at adriano.marchese@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 08, 2026 12:22 ET (16:22 GMT)

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