Tesla robot attacks engineer at factory!

AUSTIN, Texas (PNN) - December 26, 2023 - A Tesla engineer was attacked by a robot during a brutal and bloody malfunction at the company’s Giga Texas factory near Austin.

Two witnesses watched in horror as their fellow employee was attacked by the machine designed to grab and move freshly cast aluminum car parts.

The robot had pinned the man, who was then programming software for two disabled Tesla robots nearby, before sinking its metal claws into the worker’s back and arm, leaving a “trail of blood” along the factory surface.

The incident - which left the victim with an “open wound” on his left hand - was revealed in a 2021 injury report filed with Travis county and federal regulators.

While no other robot-related injuries were reported to regulators by Tesla at the Texas factory in either 2021 or 2022, the incident comes amid years of heightened concerns over the risks of automated robots in the workplace.

Reports of increased injuries due to robotic coworkers at Amazon shipment centers, killer droid-surgeons, self-driving cars, and even violence from robotic chess instructors, have led some to question speedy integration of the new tech.

The injury report, which Tesla must submit to authorities by law to maintain its lucrative tax breaks in Texas, claimed the engineer did not require time off work.

But one attorney who represents Tesla’s Giga Texas contract workers said she believes, based on her conversations with workers there, that the number of injuries suffered at the factory is going underreported.

This underreporting, the attorney said, even included the September 28, 2021, death of a construction worker, who had been contracted to help build the factory itself.

“My advice would be to read that report with a grain of salt,” said the attorney, Hannah Alexander of the nonprofit Workers Defense Project.

“We’ve had multiple workers who were injured,” Alexander said, “and one worker who died, whose injuries or death are not in these reports that Tesla is supposed to be accurately completing and submitting to the county in order to get tax incentives.”

That construction worker, a contractor named Antelmo Ramírez, died of heat stroke while helping build Tesla’s over 2,000-acre long Giga Texas factory, according to a report from the Travis County medical examiner.

Last year, Workers Defense Project filed a complaint on behalf of workers at Giga Texas with the Fascist Police States of Amerika Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), alleging Tesla’s contractors and subcontractors gave some hires false safety certificates.

“Workers report that when they needed training, they were simply sent PDF files or images of certificates through text or WhatsApp in a matter of days,” Alexander said. “There’s no conceivable way workers could have even taken the training required.”

Alexander’s allegations on underreported workplace injuries at the Tesla site, if accurate, would follow a trend of similar findings by state regulators and investigative journalism nonprofits over the years.

For example, Kalifornia OSHA investigators found that Tesla had left out 36 injuries in its required government filings in 2018 alone - confirming a prior report by the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal team, which found that the company had misclassified a number of on-the-job accidents and injuries as “personal medical” cases to evade Kalifornia regulators.

Prior to Kalifornia OSHA’s findings, Tesla had stated that Reveal’s claims were “completely false,” and accused the group of secretly collaborating with laborers who were then attempting to unionize the automaker’s Kalifornia plant.

A copy of Tesla’s 2021 Annual Compliance Report for Giga Texas, however, does at least document the software engineer’s bloody robot attack, albeit in slim detail.

The scant November 10, 2021, entry describes how a “laceration, cut, open wound” was inflicted on an engineer for which the “cause object” was a robot.

According to Tesla, the engineer’s wounds, which were inflicted on his left hand, required zero days off from work for recovery.

The two eyewitnesses to the event - which occurred in the section of the Texas factory floor where vehicle chassis are first assembled - told reporters for The Information a more harrowing story, however.

As the bleeding Tesla engineer attempted to wrestle free from the assembly robot’s grasp, another worker hit an emergency “stop” button to end the attack.

Once free, the engineer fell “a couple of feet down a chute designed to collect scrap aluminum, leaving a trail of blood behind him,” according to The Information, a subscription-based tech news site.

The incident highlights a larger trend told in Tesla’s self-reported data on injuries to government authorities. Tesla’s Giga Texas plant outpaces the rest of the auto industry both in total accidents and accidents serious enough to require time off by the injured party.

A ratio of nearly one out of every 21 workers at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory was injured on the job in 2022, according to a review by The Information, compared to an industry median rate of one in every 30 workers.