'Blood trail on the floor': a robot attacked an engineer at a Tesla plant in Texas

A Tesla engineer was attacked by a robot due to a malfunction at the company's Giga Texas plant near Austin. He dug his metal claws into the worker's back and arm, leaving a bloody trail on the factory floor, reports Dailymail.

Photo: IStock

Two witnesses watched in horror as their colleague was attacked by a machine designed to grab and move freshly cast aluminum car parts. The robot pinned a man who was checking the software for two disabled Tesla robots.

The incident, which left the victim with an "open wound" on his left arm, was disclosed in a 2021 injury report filed in Travis County.

Rise of the Machines

Tesla did not report any other robot-related injuries to regulators in 2021 or 2022 at its Texas plant. The incident comes amid years of heightened concern about the risks associated with the use of automated robots in the workplace.

Reports of rising injuries from robot colleagues at Amazon shipping centers, killer droid surgeons, self-driving cars and even violence from robot chess instructors have led some to question the rapid integration of the new technology.

On the subject: A robot killed a man in South Korea

A copy of Tesla's 2021 annual compliance report for Giga Texas at least documents the bloody robot attack on a software engineer, albeit in small detail.

The sparse entry, dated November 10, 2021, states that the “lacerated, cut, open wound” was “inflicted on the engineer by a robot.” Tesla says the injured engineer did not require additional time off after the attack.

However, two eyewitnesses to the event, which took place at the Texas plant's site where car chassis are assembled, told a more harrowing story. As the bleeding Tesla engineer tried to escape the assembly robot's grasp, another worker pressed the emergency stop button to stop the attack. Having freed himself, the engineer fell “into a chute designed to collect aluminum scrap, leaving a trail of blood behind him.”

False reports

An attorney representing Tesla Giga Texas contract workers said that based on her conversations with workers, she believes the number of injuries sustained at the plant is being underreported.

This underreporting even included the death of the construction worker who was contracted to help build the plant itself on September 28, 2021, the lawyer said.

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

“We had several workers that were injured,” Alexander said. — One worker died. His injuries and death are not listed on these reports, which Tesla must accurately complete and submit to the county in order to receive tax benefits.”

The builder, a contractor named Antelmo Ramirez, died of heatstroke while helping build Tesla's Giga Texas plant, according to the Travis County medical examiner's report.

Last year, the Workers Defense Project filed a complaint on behalf of Giga Texas workers with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), alleging that Tesla contractors and subcontractors provided some employees with false safety certifications.

Alexander's allegations of incomplete reporting of workplace injuries at the Tesla plant, if true, would be consistent with similar findings by government regulators and nonprofit investigative journalism over the years.

California OSHA investigators, for example, found that Tesla failed to include 36 injuries in its required government filings in 2018 alone, confirming a previous report by the group Center for Investigative Reporting's Reveal. The panel found that the company had misclassified a number of work-related accidents and injuries. The company flagged them as "personal health care" cases to evade California regulators' oversight.

Before California OSHA reached its conclusion, Tesla said Reveal's claims were "completely false." She accused the group of secretly collaborating with workers who were then trying to unionize the automaker's California plant.

At Tesla's Giga Texas plant, nearly one in every 2022 workers was injured on the job in 21, compared with the industry average of one in every 30 workers, according to a review by The Information.

For more serious workplace injuries, the ratio was roughly one in every 26 workers at Tesla's Texas plant in 2022. Such injuries resulted in either missed days of work or reassignment to other jobs.

By comparison, at other major U.S. auto plants, the average rate of such injuries was one in every 38 workers.

Neglect of safety standards

The rapid two-year construction of the Giga Texas facility led to decreased safety and increased injuries, sources said.

Tesla fans like Tesmanian called it "Elon Speed" at the time, boasting that "Tesla hired three shifts of workers to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."

Tesla said worker injuries ranged from blunt force trauma to chemical exposure and mechanical accidents that took some workers months to recover.

Injuries include sprains, cuts and fractures caused by workers trapped in machines, as well as illnesses resulting from exposure to toxins such as ammonia.

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One employee was unable to work for more than four months after his ankle was caught in a moving cart in August 2022. Shortly after, another worker was hit in the head with a metal object, which took 85 days to recover, according to OSHA.

Tesla received more than $60 million in tax breaks. But those tax breaks had to come with strict requirements that Musk's company might not have to follow, said Alexander, the Workers Defense Project lawyer.

“Tesla must produce annual compliance reports for purposes of this ‘economic development’ incentive agreement,” Alexander said.

“What I found, among many of the construction workers that I talked to who had injuries, was that their injuries were not reported,” Alexander said.

“As with deceased worker Antelmo Ramirez, his death was not registered,” the Austin lawyer continued.

“They must report every construction worker injury or death. And not just about the injuries and deaths of people directly employed by Tesla, but also about any construction worker who worked on the site,” she says.

The exact wording on this issue is given on page 12 agreement dated July 14, 2020, which is now available to the public.

Texas is the most dangerous state for construction workers

Texas is considered the deadliest place for construction workers in the United States. Construction workers in Texas are 22 percent more likely to die on the job than anywhere else in the country, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“A construction worker dies every three days in Texas,” Alexander said.

“Based on other reports, the impetus for Tesla's move to Texas was that the company was unhappy with the health and safety protections that California had in place at the time,” she said.

Musk moved Tesla's headquarters and production after becoming frustrated with restrictions in California during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Partially because of Giga Texas' sheer size—nearly 100 football fields in total area—the company decided to bring part of the plant online while the rest was still under construction.

“They continued to build other parts of it once it started functioning,” Alexander says.

This, the lawyer argues, may have contributed to higher than average injury rates among factory workers.

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