The accident allegedly occurred at the Gigafactory near Austin, Texas in 2021. According to a report accessed by , one of the robots used to move freshly cast aluminum car parts unexpectedly attacked a Tesla engineer standing nearby. At that time, the man allegedly made modifications to the software of two other broken robots of the company.
The robot injured a Tesla employee. “Brutal” and “bloody” attack
The whole thing looks quite mysterious. The newspaper describes the robot attack as “brutal” and “bloody”, but admits that the report lacks details about the incident. Tesla only wrote that an employee described as a company engineer suffered a “laceration, cutting and open” wound caused by the robot. It added that despite such injuries, the employee did not require a single day off to recover, which is puzzling.
Much more details were provided earlier by , who spoke to two eyewitnesses of the event. As he describes, the robot was supposed to “immobilize” the employee completely unexpectedly, and then drive metal elements constituting the gripper of the machine’s boom into his back and arm. The man freed himself, but as a result of his injuries he rolled “several feet down a scrap chute,” leaving a “bloody trail.” At the same time, another employee pressed the emergency stop button and turned the machine off.
It is not clear why the robot attacked an employee at the Tesla factory, but the company’s opponents report that there are definitely more similar situations. The Information claims that only in this factory in Texas and only in 2022, every 21st employee suffered some kind of health damage. Every 26th employee suffered more serious injuries. Both results are well below the industry average.
There were going to be more similar incidents?
Hannah Alexander, a lawyer for the Workers Defense Project, quoted by the Daily Mail, claims that there are more accidents in Tesla factories, but there are no official reports about them because the company ignores them. Moreover, she explains that during the construction of the mentioned Texas factory, one of the workers died of heat stroke, which was also not reported. As an example, the California Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) found in March 2020 that Tesla concealed 36 accidents at its factories in official documents in 2018 alone.
The Daily Mail reports that the above-mentioned case of an accident involving a robot is the last one described in official reports. For the next two years, until 2023 – according to Tesla – no other accidents occurred, which raises doubts among workers’ rights defenders. Various types of accidents have been reported, including: in Amazon warehouses. Portal that Tesla confirmed that the described report is true, but at the same time denied reports that similar cases of injuries in factories are hidden.
Source: Gazeta
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