What happened
Around 6 p.m. on Monday, October 26, 2026, a Starship Technologies delivery robot carrying a Bolt sticker came from Tehnika street onto the crosswalk at the Luise–Tehnika intersection in Tallinn, Estonia, against a red light, according to the city bus company, Tallinna Linnatransport (TLT). TLT says the bus driver and other road users confirmed the light. It was dark and rush hour.
The driver braked sharply. Standing passengers fell, and TLT says up to nine were injured. Video from the bus shows the bus and the robot colliding and the robot being pushed along the road, ERR reported. After the stop, the driver asked whether anyone needed help or an ambulance; nobody said they did, and with TLT’s control center he continued the route before going home for the day, TLT board member Andrei Novikov told ERR. TLT later filed a police report and received one passenger complaint about their health.
Novikov’s summary on Estonian television the next evening: “The robot fled, if you can put it that way… The robot is at fault in any case.” Starship disputes the first part. Its head of operations, Pepe Aaviksoo, said the robot contacted its back-office team, which moved it off the road, and it waited at the curb for about ten minutes. “From our perspective, the situation was clear,” he said, “as indicated by the fact that the bus left the scene and we did not detect any rescue vehicles or police at the scene.”
On the cause, Aaviksoo told ETV’s Aktuaalne kaamera on Thursday that it was dark, an illuminated advertisement sat behind the traffic lights, and the pedestrian and car signals were in the same line of sight, and the robot misread the traffic light, ERR reported; with no cars approaching, it decided to cross. He said the robot’s light sensitivity was not working as it should have and had changed for some reason, and that the fixes would be mainly software: “The robot is largely a software-based machine, and the improvements are primarily software-based.” “There are many lessons to be learned, but exceptional situations do occur,” he said. The robots move autonomously and are not constantly watched, he said: with several thousand worldwide, that “is simply not physically possible or economically sustainable.” Earlier he had noted that robots had crossed this intersection successfully more than 4,000 times. Starship has rerouted its robots away from it during an internal investigation.
The limits matter. Fault has not been formally established: police were not called to the scene, and Starship’s explanation is preliminary. The red light is TLT’s account; the injury count is TLT’s, and their severity was not reported. Whether the robot “fled” is disputed. Bolt’s link is the sticker and some deliveries; Starship controls the robots in traffic. The crossing and fleet numbers are Starship’s. All reporting so far comes from Estonian media quoting TLT and Starship; we found no police statement or Starship press release as of October 30. One incident, not a rate.