What Is NHTSA SGO 2021-01?
NHTSA Standing General Order 2021-01 is a federal reporting mandate issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in June 2021 and subsequently amended. It requires manufacturers and operators of vehicles equipped with automated driving systems (ADS, SAE Levels 3-5) or certain advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS, SAE Level 2) to report crashes to NHTSA.
This order is the primary mechanism through which the U.S. government collects data on autonomous vehicle safety. It is the foundation of the data used by this tracker and by most public analyses of robotaxi safety performance, including for Tesla's robotaxi crash rate and comparisons between Tesla and Waymo.
Who Must Report?
SGO 2021-01 applies to two categories of automated vehicle technology:
ADS (Automated Driving Systems) - Levels 3-5
Manufacturers and operators of vehicles with ADS must report if the ADS was engaged at any time within 30 seconds of a crash. This category covers fully autonomous vehicles like Tesla's unsupervised robotaxis in Austin, Waymo's driverless vehicles, and Cruise's autonomous fleet.
ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems) - Level 2
Manufacturers of Level 2 systems (like Tesla Autopilot and FSD Supervised in consumer vehicles) must also report, but with a higher severity threshold. ADAS reports are required only for crashes involving a hospital-treated injury, fatality, vehicle tow-away, airbag deployment, or a vulnerable road user (pedestrian or cyclist).
For the purposes of our robotaxi safety tracker, we focus on ADS reports for Tesla's Austin fleet, which represents true Level 4 autonomous driving without a human safety driver in direct control.
What Must Be Reported?
Under SGO 2021-01, a crash must be reported if the automated system was engaged at any point within 30 seconds prior to the crash and the crash involves any of the following:
- Any injury or fatality to any person involved
- Vehicle tow-away of any vehicle involved
- Airbag deployment in any vehicle involved
- Vulnerable road user involvement (pedestrian, cyclist, person using a personal conveyance)
For ADS (Level 3-5), additional lower-threshold criteria apply: any property damage crash reportable under state law may also trigger a report, even without injuries or tow-aways.
This broad scope means that many incidents captured by SGO would be considered minor and would not generate a police report or insurance claim in a typical human-driven crash scenario.
Reporting Timelines
The order specifies two reporting deadlines:
| Report Type |
Deadline |
Trigger |
| Initial report |
1 calendar day |
Crashes involving fatality, hospital-treated injury, or airbag deployment |
| Updated report |
10 calendar days |
All other reportable crashes; also used to update initial reports with additional information |
After NHTSA receives reports, there is an additional processing delay before the data appears in the public database. This means that the most recent few days of data on any tracker (including ours) may be incomplete. We discuss this reporting lag in detail on our FAQ page.
What Fields Are Included in Reports?
Each SGO report includes the following information:
- Incident date and time
- Location (city and state)
- ADS/ADAS engagement status at time of crash
- Vehicle make, model, and year
- Crash type (rear-end, sideswipe, etc.)
- Injury and fatality status
- Road and weather conditions
- Other vehicles and road users involved
- Crash narrative (description of what happened)
However, manufacturers are permitted to claim confidential business information (CBI) protections for certain fields. Tesla, notably, redacts the crash narrative in most of its SGO reports. This limits the public's ability to determine fault or understand the circumstances of each incident. Waymo, by contrast, typically provides more detailed narratives.
How SGO Reporting Differs from Human Crash Reporting
This is the critical distinction that makes direct comparisons between autonomous vehicles and human drivers so challenging:
| Factor |
Human Driver Crashes |
SGO AV Crashes |
| Reporting trigger |
Voluntary (police report or insurance claim) |
Mandatory for all qualifying events |
| Severity threshold |
High (usually involves significant damage or injury) |
Lower (includes minor property damage) |
| Underreporting |
Significant (many minor crashes go unreported) |
Minimal (mandatory with penalties for non-compliance) |
| Fault attribution |
Often determined by police or insurance |
Not included in SGO reports |
Because of these differences, a robotaxi fleet reporting 92,500 miles per incident under SGO is not directly comparable to the human benchmark of 500,000 miles per police-reported crash. The robotaxi number captures more minor events. The true "apples-to-apples" comparison would require either filtering SGO reports to match police report severity, or adjusting human stats to include unreported incidents. Neither adjustment has a definitive methodology.
For more on this topic, see our FAQ section on human driver comparisons and our Tesla robotaxi crash rate analysis.
Why SGO 2021-01 Matters for Robotaxi Safety
Despite its imperfections, SGO 2021-01 provides the only standardized, publicly available dataset for tracking autonomous vehicle safety across manufacturers. Without it, safety claims would be entirely self-reported by companies with obvious incentives to present favorable data.
The order enables:
- Public accountability: Anyone can access the data and verify safety claims
- Trend tracking: Consistent reporting allows tracking safety improvements over time, as our main tracker does
- Cross-manufacturer comparison: The same reporting standard applies to Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, and all other AV operators
- Regulatory oversight: NHTSA can identify safety patterns and issue recalls or investigations
The order is periodically updated. NHTSA has amended the original 2021 order multiple times to clarify definitions, adjust reporting thresholds, and improve data quality. The official order and all amendments are available on the NHTSA Standing General Order page.