Two witnesses reported being horrified when their fellow employee was violently assaulted by the machine, which was designed to grab and move freshly cast aluminum car parts around the factory.
What the robot apparently did was mistake the man for a car part, grabbing him with its metal claws and sinking them into the employee's back and arm. This left a "trail of blood" along the floor of the factory.
The incident left the man with an "open wound" on his left hand, but Tesla never bothered to file an injury report with Travis County or federal regulators.
(Related: By the end of 2025, China is planning to mass-produce humanoid robots to replace human workers.)
Tesla breaking law for lucrative tax breaks
Not only did Tesla violate state and federal law by failing to file an injury report following the incident, but the company has also continued to benefit from lucrative tax breaks that are contingent upon the proper filing of said reports.
Will Tesla have to pay back any of those taxes it cheated Texas out of receiving? The answer is more than likely a big no, which is nothing new for Musk who has sleazed his way to billionaire status by bilking taxpayers via tax breaks and subsidies.
Tesla would likely not even exist were it not for the federal subsidies Musk clawed as part of the company's creation. Now, Tesla is rapidly descending into the abyss of automation and artificial intelligence, AI being another pet project of Musk.
The same types of robot-initiated injuries are rather common at Amazon as well, the distribution centers of which are increasingly powered by AI robots rather than human beings.
In the case of Tesla and the bloody assault incident, the company is now trying to argue that it never filed the proper injury reports because the victim did not require any time off of work, despite the trail of blood that poured from his body.
Workers Defense Project attorney Hannah Alexander believes that, based on multiple conversations she has had with other Tesla employees over the years, the company is failing to report all kinds of injuries that occur at production plants on the regular.
Another similar incident occurred on Sept. 28, 2021, when a construction worker named Antelmo Ramírez who helped build the Tesla factory itself died of heat stroke.
"We've had multiple workers who were injured, 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."
Workers Defense Project filed a complaint last year on behalf of employees at the Giga Texas factory with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). That complaint accuses Tesla's contractors and subcontractors of giving some company 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."
Over the past several years, numerous state regulators and investigative journalism nonprofit groups have published their own reports claiming similar malfeasances at the Tesla site, including a whopping 36 injuries that were left out of the company's required government filings in 2018 alone – all to illegally maintain those cushy tax breaks.
The latest news about the industrial shift towards automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can be found at Robotics.news.
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