The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation opened a preliminary evaluation of Comma.ai's openpilot driver-assistance stack on 23 September 2026, citing five reported crashes involving two fatal incidents that killed three people and injured up to 11.
What NHTSA is investigating
The probe focuses on incidents in which retrofit devices running openpilot failed to detect or respond to slow or stopped vehicles in the same lane. In one February 2026 crash in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, a 2022 Toyota RAV4 running a third-party fork of openpilot called FrogPilot struck a marked Gonzales Police Department cruiser stopped in the left lane with emergency lights on, killing two rear-seat passengers of the Toyota. NHTSA's evaluation will assess whether the underlying software or the after-market installation model shows a defect trend.
Comma.ai and the fork problem
Comma.ai was founded in 2015 by George Hotz and sells the comma 3X retrofit device that runs the open-source openpilot stack on more than 300 supported cars. Because openpilot is open source, forks such as FrogPilot are widely deployed, and NHTSA's notice acknowledged that attribution across original and forked code is part of the inquiry.
Context
The evaluation lands as regulators shift focus toward retrofit and Level 2+ systems. See Waymo's teen-rider rollout, Mercedes and Wayve's production agreement and Tesla's Robotaxi fleet expansion in Austin.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch.