The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into Avride, Uber’s autonomous vehicle partner, after identifying 16 crashes and one minor injury in the four months since the company launched its robotaxi service in Dallas. The regulator’s language is unusually blunt: the vehicles displayed “ excessive assertiveness and insufficient capability ,” a phrase that could describe not just Avride’s self-driving system but the broader industry’s determination to deploy autonomous vehicles before they can reliably avoid hitting things. The crashes, which occurred between December 2025 and March 2026 , involved Avride’s fleet of Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicles changing lanes into the path of other cars, failing to slow or stop for slow-moving and stationary vehicles, and striking objects in the road. All incidents occurred with a safety monitor sitting in the driver’s seat. In only one of the 16 reported crashes did the safety monitor attempt to intervene.…