About AutoPilotWatch
Our Mission
We believe the public deserves transparent, comprehensive data about autonomous vehicle safety.
Autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles are transforming how we travel. But with that transformation comes real risk — and the public has a right to understand that risk through clear, accessible data. AutoPilotWatch exists to bridge the gap between raw government filings and meaningful public understanding.
We take fragmented, technical regulatory data and turn it into searchable, browsable, and downloadable information that journalists, researchers, policymakers, and everyday people can actually use. No paywalls. No spin. Just data.
What We Track
AutoPilotWatch is the most comprehensive public database of autonomous vehicle safety data in the United States. Our database currently includes:
Data Sources
All of our data comes from official U.S. government sources. We don't scrape news articles or rely on crowdsourced reports — we go directly to the regulatory filings:
- NHTSA Standing General Order (SGO) Reports — The cornerstone of our database. Mandatory crash reporting for vehicles equipped with ADS and Level 2 ADAS systems, effective since June 2021.
- NHTSA Consumer Complaints Database — Consumer-submitted complaints about autonomous driving features, including phantom braking, unexpected acceleration, and other ADAS/ADS failures.
- NHTSA Investigations & Recalls — Vehicle recalls and formal defect investigations related to autonomous driving software and hardware.
- NHTSA Safety Ratings (NCAP) — New Car Assessment Program crash test ratings, providing context on overall vehicle crashworthiness.
What Makes Us Different
There are other sites tracking aspects of AV safety — and we respect their work. But AutoPilotWatch fills a unique niche:
- Comprehensive, not single-manufacturer: Unlike sites focused solely on Tesla (such as TeslaDeaths.com), we track all 60 manufacturers reporting under SGO — from Waymo to Cruise to Aurora to Zoox and beyond.
- Government data, not news scraping: We use official NHTSA filings, not media reports. This gives us systematic, comparable data across all manufacturers.
- Multi-dimensional:We don't just count crashes. We provide manufacturer rankings, vehicle breakdowns, state-level analysis, complaint tracking, recall monitoring, and investigation status — all in one place.
- Downloadable and open: All our processed data is freely available for download. Build on it, analyze it, challenge it.
Independence
AutoPilotWatch is an independent project. We are not funded by, affiliated with, or endorsed by any vehicle manufacturer, technology company, lobbying group, or government agency. We have no financial relationship with Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, General Motors, or any other company whose data appears on this site. Our analysis is based solely on publicly available government data.
AutoPilotWatch is a project of TheDataProject.ai, which builds public-interest data tools.
How to Use This Site
AutoPilotWatch offers several ways to explore the data:
- Browse all incidents — Search and filter the full database of SGO crash reports
- Manufacturer rankings — Compare incident counts, fatalities, and fleet composition across all 60 manufacturers
- Vehicle models — Drill into specific makes and models
- State-level data — See which states have the most AV incidents and why
- Consumer complaints — Read real NHTSA complaints about AV features
- Recalls — Track AV-related safety recalls
- Trends — Year-over-year charts and analysis
- Downloads — Download all our data for your own analysis
Contact
Questions, corrections, data requests, or media inquiries? We'd love to hear from you. Visit our contact page or reach out via GitHub.
If you're a journalist working on a story about autonomous vehicle safety, we're happy to provide data, context, and analysis. We believe informed reporting makes everyone safer.