For years, Tesla has faced intense public and regulatory scrutiny over the safety of its self-driving software.

Now, a former Tesla manager is blowing the whistle on what he says is the the Elon Musk-led automaker’s dangerous approach to testing and deploying its autonomous vehicle technology.

In a federal lawsuit reported by The Independent, Javier Medrano accused Tesla of turning its autonomous test fleet in Houston into 24/7 “rolling hazards” by “aggressively” scaling up operations. 

The size of the fleet more than doubled to a size that Medrano claims was impossible to oversee on his own,. Despite consistently pleading higher-ups for more help, he alleges his warnings were ignored, and he was later fired.

“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.'”

Medrano took over as the sole operational manager of Houston’s FSD test fleet eight months after joining the company in 2023. When he joined, the size of its fleet and human operators was just 15. But months later, Tesla increased it to 38 vehicle operators. These employees kept the cars running for 24 hours a day across three shifts, and Medrano, as remote fleet manager, oversaw them all.

This “dangerous 38:1 operator-to-manager ratio,” the suit argues, violated Tesla’s own “mandated 15:1 safety baseline.”

These operators, by the way, were part of Tesla’s controversial “Rodeo Team,” whose existence was first made public in reporting from Business Insider in 2024. The moniker is fitting: these drivers purposely got their autonomous cars into dangerous situations and only intervened at the last possible moment, providing Tesla valuable training data.

The lawsuit claims that in other cities with Rodeo Teams, Tesla had more than one safety lead. Having to oversee this sprawling fleet self-driving daredevils was wearing Medrano down to a nub. In one email to his boss, he confessed he was “trying not to lose my absolute mind, from not sleeping or eating correctly and doing everything I need to do to actually meet the expectations,” per the Independent. A month later, he begged for another safety lead and asked for a week off.

“This is officially my S.O.S signal,” he wrote.

Inevitably, all this foreshadowing came to a head. Just days after sending that message, one of the FSD vehicles was involved in a collision with another car. The test driver, following protocol, called Medrano after the accident, at the late hour of 2:05 AM. 

But Medrano was so exhausted that he answered the phone call while “physically asleep,” according to the complaint, causing him to give erroneous advice to the operator. Following his orders, she remained at the scene of the accident, where she was allegedly approached by an impaired stranger.

Medrano told HR the next day he had “no recollection” of the phone call, per The Independent. He then echoed his complaints of “severe understaffing” he’d made to his boss.

The response he apparently got was baffling and callous. An HR rep allegedly told Medrano to set his phone on “Do Not Disturb” mode if he didn’t want to be bothered during active testing shifts. And the Autopilot director said he should’ve “delegated” better.

But, he told The Indepedent, “I didn’t have anybody to delegate to.”

“I was really trying to let them know how serious this was,” Medrano added. “But there was no sense of urgency.” 

“It’s baffling to me how this went on so long,” he continued. “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.”

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