A fired manager overseeing Tesla’s fully autonomous driving test operations in Houston is now suing the company for illegal retaliation after growing concerns about “systemic safety oversight failures,” according to a lawsuit spotted by The Independent. Director Javier Medrano says Tesla’s reluctance to offer additional resources or hire more staff has created a scenario in which the company’s robo-taxis have become “rolling hazards on public roads.”
Woozad has asked Tesla for comment on the lawsuit. We will update this article if we receive a response.
The filing says Medrano led a team of safety operators who rode in Tesla vehicles used to test the company’s fully autonomous driving software from October 2024 to May 1, 2025. As manager, Medrano was required to “actively audit driving clips, conduct weekly drives, and manage safety incidents,” and provide significant on-call availability during the week. Medrano’s problems began because the number of operators he was responsible for increased to 38 — beyond the 1-to-15 ratio Tesla Autopilot director Pete Scheutzow set as a benchmark.
The lawsuit claims that in a conversation with Scheutzow, Medrano attempted to raise concern that the current ratio of managers to operators might cause him to “not sleep or eat properly,” but Scheutzow allegedly brushed it off by saying “I don’t feel like you’re drowning.” The lawsuit claims that Tesla’s refusal to respond to Medrano led to the ultimate failure of the company’s “underfunded safety structure” in the form of an accident that occurred on Medrano’s watch.
Medrano dealt with the accident “while she was physically asleep,” the lawsuit claims, and ended up giving the operator “dangerous advice” that led her to “remain at the dangerous premises for an hour where she was approached by an allegedly impaired third party.” Following the accident, the lawsuit says Medrano’s attempts to officially escalate safety concerns that led to the accident and prove that Tesla was withholding resources from his Houston area led to his firing.
In exchange for what the lawsuit says is unlawful retaliation, Medrano is asking to be reinstated to his position and seeking fees such as restitution of an unvested stock award, upfront and back payments, and compensatory damages for “emotional distress, family strain, and severe financial stress.” Tesla’s technical approach to autonomous vehicles has been criticized in the past, but the lawsuit suggests management problems could also make the company’s robo-taxis unsafe.
That’s not to say the company’s software isn’t also a problem. In May, Reuters reported that Tesla may be exaggerating the safety of its Full Self-Driving software. According to the report, data labelers who work with the camera images Tesla uses to navigate regularly see FSD fail in basic driving tasks. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also currently studying the company’s self-driving technology. Although a version of Tesla’s software requiring driver supervision is available now, crashes, the slow rollout of the company’s robotaxi service and now-apparent management issues make the success of fully autonomous driving increasingly uncertain.
