The report includes data collected over a 10-month period following an order last summer that required automakers to report incidents that included cars with advanced driver-assistance systems. Fully autonomous vehicles such as Google spinoff Waymo or General Motors-controlled Cruise LLC ended up in 130 crashes, most of them occurring when the car was struck from behind, 108 of which resulted in no injuries and only one of which resulted in a serious injury. Meanwhile, cars with partially automated systems experienced nearly 400 crashes.(NHTSA did not provide the total number of hours or miles driven.) Six people died and five were seriously injured. A previous crash in a Tesla Model S ended in a fire that took four hours and more than 30,000 gallons of water to put out.

The study is a reminder not only that the fully self-driving future many people imagine is a long way off, but also that a present in which cars can perform on their own some functions traditionally reserved for humans can prove dangerous. The NHTSA also recently upgraded a probe of Tesla Autopilot to an engineering analysis; investigators are examining the feature’s responsibility for repeated collisions with parked emergency vehicles such as ambulances and police cruisers — which drivers should have been able to see about eight seconds before impact, but which they