For reasons that never quite made sense to me, people get all jiggly when the conversation turns to Tesla and its so-called “robotaxis.” Some act as if the thought of a car that picks you up and drives you to your chosen destination without a human driver — nothing less than a horizontal elevator — is akin to the Second Coming.
CleanTechnica and every other online or print publication has been obsessing for years over every scrap of news about Tesla’s robotaxi intentions, but no one seems to have had much of an idea about what was going on behind the scenes. We knew in a general sort of way there were people who had supervisory control over the cars as they zipped around various cities, but never knew much about what life was like for those people.
A Complaint From A Robotaxi Supervisor
One of them is Javier Medrano, who was the supervisor of the safety operators in the Houston area. When he complained about having to supervise 38 people instead of the 15 person maximum specified by company policy, he was fired. He filed suit in federal court in Houston this week, seeking to get his job back along with monetary compensation.
In his complaint, Medrano says he was fired after raising alarms about “systemic safety oversight defects,” and claims that a refusal to add more staff turned the Tesla robotaxis into “rolling hazards on public streets.” He claims originally he was supposed to supervise 15 people but ultimately he was responsible for 38 safety operators. His assigned duties included auditing driving videos, doing weekly ride-alongs, handling safety incidents, and being on call throughout the week.
According to the lawsuit, Medrano told the robotaxi director he was working for that he was worried the workload could leave him “not sleeping or eating correctly.” The cars were being operated 24 hours a day, with safety operators working three eight hour shifts. Medrano says he was responsible for each one, resulting in a “dangerous 38:1 operator-to-manager ratio.” A month later, Medrano emailed his supervisor pleading for the company to hire an additional team leader and to allow him a week or two as a “physical/mental break.” He wrote, “This is officially my S.O.S signal.”
Complaints Ignored
His supervisor dismissed his concerns, saying, “I don’t get the impression you’re drowning.” The suit ties that pressure to the failure of an “under-resourced safety structure,” which resulted in a crash on his watch. In his court filing, he said, “Due to the severe biological exhaustion I had formally escalated days prior, I processed the phone call while physically asleep. Because I was in a state of sleep-deprived cognitive incapacitation, I provided unsafe guidance to the operator — including laughing, which the operator later reported as sounding surprisingly ‘chill’ and nonchalant.”
This, the complaint contends, “inadvertently resulted in the operator remaining at the unsafe scene for an hour where she was approached by an allegedly impaired third party. This compromised emergency response was not a willful managerial error or negligence by me; it was the direct, predictable symptom of [Tesla’s] intentionally defective public-road safety protocols and extreme under-staffing.”
The next day, Medrano went to HR and said he had “no recollection” of the call, and later emailed the department about the “ongoing extreme motor vehicle local safety oversight hazard on Houston public roads,” saying the “severe under-staffing appeared contrary to the Code of Business Ethics commitment to ‘A Safe Place to Work,’ where safety should not be compromised for production.” After he tried to formally escalate the issues and show that resources were being withheld from his region, he was fired. Now he is asking the court for reinstatement and damages for “emotional distress, familial strain, and severe financial stress.”
Full Self Driving Concerns
The complaint identifies Tesla management as a source of risk over and above the ongoing concerns about the safety of the full self driving software itself. Federal safety officials have opened a probe into FSD following several failures at traffic signals. Independent tallies have shown Tesla’s robotaxi fleet experiences crashes at a higher rate than Waymo, which operates without human backups.
One of the reasons Tesla has chosen to introduce its robotaxi services in Texas cities is surely because that state takes a laissez faire approach to autonomous vehicles as opposed to other states such as California. Critics argue that allowing one exhausted person to be in charge of auditing dozens of cars is itself a safety hazard. Company policy sets 15 as the maximum number of people one employee should be expected to supervise, and yet Medrano was tasked with supervising more than double that number.
“It almost feels like these big corporations can get away with anything, and people just kind of put their heads down and say, ‘Well, this is how it is,’” Medrano told The Independent. “And it breeds an environment where people don’t say, ‘This is not okay.’” He said he asked higher-ups to “please help me out,” but that “nothing happened. I was really trying to let them know how serious this was, but there was no sense of urgency.
“It’s baffling to me how this went on so long. In other cities, they had multiple leads per shift. I was the only one who didn’t have that luxury. Our job is to make sure these cars are safe on the road. In autonomous vehicle testing on public roadways, remote fleet managers act as the critical human safety redundancy to manage hazards, emergencies, and post-collision protocols,” he said in the complaint filed with the court.
He alleged that the human safety monitors are instructed to not intervene in the operation of a vehicle until the last possible second, because that provides the company with more data to work with, according to people with knowledge of the situation who spoke with Business Insider. But doing so also poses dangers to other drivers.
On May 1, 2025, Medrano was fired. “Our decision here is final,” the Autopilot director told Medrano, who condemned him for not having delegated better, according to the complaint. Yet Medrano told The Independent, “I didn’t have anybody to delegate to.”
CleanTechnica readers are divided into two groups — those who swear by Elon Musk and those who swear at him. This story contains some rather disturbing information about how Tesla operates its so-called robotaxi service — information that might cause you some anxiety if you are riding in one of Musk supposedly safe computer guided cars.
Yet it also raises some concerns about the credibility of the central character, whose rendition of the events at Tesla does sound bizarre. In addition, who admits in a court filing to answering calls while sleeping? That doesn’t seem normal, does it? And while anyone can sue anybody at any time about anything — especially in the US — filing a complaint in federal court without an attorney is highly unusual.
Readers are free to make up their own minds. We report; you retort. That’s what the comments section is for.
