If you get a speeding ticket once in a while, it’s probably a sign that you should be more careful. If you get several each year, it may be a sign that you should re-evaluate your approach to driving altogether.
Tesla Motors was founded in 2003 in Palo Alto, California by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Though many might know the company these days as “Elon Musk’s electric car company,” Musk actually joined Tesla as the chairman of its board of directors in 2004. He is currently the company’s CEO.
Tesla Motors’ ultimate goal is reducing, or removing entirely, the output of harmful chemicals into the atmosphere by automotive vehicles. In order to accomplish this, Tesla wants to popularize electric cars, making cars that run on fossil fuels obsolete. The company wants electric vehicles to be seen not as a luxury item, but as affordable, mass-produced, mainstay means of personal transportation.
Despite this noble goal, the path to it has proven bumpy. Besides the current litigations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against its CEO, Tesla has had higher than average accident rates over the past four years. The L.A. Times in 2017 mused that Tesla’s safety rating was “lower than sawmills and slaughterhouses,” reporting that safety records released by an anonymous Tesla employee painted an ugly picture, to say the least.
In 2014, Tesla’s accident rate was reportedly 15% higher than the auto industry average. In 2015, it was 31% higher than the industry average. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, in 2016 Tesla’s workplace safety incident rates were 30.6% above the automotive industry’s averages - beyond that, it even said that the company had failed to report certain injuries in accordance with state law.
The California-based labor advocacy group Worksafe reported that the company’s 2017 workplace accident rate was 8.8 per 100 workers, while the auto industry’s average was 6.7 per 100 workers (these figures are based on information reported to the U.S. government, which Tesla shares with its employees).
Objectively, Tesla’s workplace safety ratings are disconcertingly high, and it probably has a lot to do with the company’s unorthodox structure and propensity for “fast-paced” working conditions. Electrical Apparatus reached out to Tesla for a comment, but they did not disclose a statement.
In April, Laurie Shelby, global vice president for health and safety at Tesla, made an appearance on Dr. Todd Conklin’s “PreAccident Investigation Podcast,” in which she talked about the safety culture at Tesla. Shelby said that Tesla’s safety culture focuses primarily on a “find it, fix it” mentality - finding and controlling factors that lead to workplace accidents. She said that communication between employees, supervisors, and executives is an important component of this philosophy. “I don’t think you can communicate enough [with your employees],” she said.
On the other hand, she also talked about the company’s “Life-Altering Injury and Fatality Elimination” (LAIFE) model, a data-driven approach to workplace safety similar to Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) and Safety Instrumented Function (SIF) practices. She said that there are multiple teams constantly working to identify problems at Tesla’s factories; typically, one team or set of teams roam the factory floor looking for problems to fix, while another team or set of teams focus on analyzing data gathered by they and other Tesla employees. She also said that Tesla works to identify ergonomic issues that can lead to soft muscle problems, intervening as soon as they receive complaints from employees.
Then, she began talking about the culture of Tesla beyond its safety approach. She described the workplace culture of Tesla as more fluid than other environments in which she had previously worked. At Tesla, she said, employee ideas can be sent to a design team and prototyped within hours, and any employee can suggest changes, big or small. While this may make Tesla factories sound like the perfect creative environments, in practice, working at one can get hectic. “You really have to think faster on your feet…You have to make decisions really more in the moment than in my past positions.”
While a run-and-gun attitude to production may be an ideal atmosphere for creative innovation, evidence from the past few years suggests that in Tesla’s case, this may have led to extensive safety issues, despite the measures the company has taken to protect its employees. Tesla is straining itself to roll out a new, highly-anticipated product, which it hopes will change the world…though altruistic efforts like these are valuable, the problem seems to be that they consider any kind of structure to be an obstacle to innovation rather than a necessary part of running a business. More importantly, it doesn’t seem like whatever measures they have been taking to reduce accident rates have been enough.
This year, the company has already run over more than a few stumbling blocks as it speeds towards the launch of its long-awaited “Model 3.” In March, a California man was killed when his Tesla Model X, which was engaged in autopilot, crashed into a concrete traffic barrier, prompting an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board into the effectiveness of the Model X’s safety features.
In April, an accident at Tesla’s Fremont, California location occurred that left a factory worker hospitalized with a broken jaw. Representatives from Tesla have since said that this employee was a contractor under the supervision of a company outside of Tesla. Shortly after this was made public, Elon Musk tweeted about his frustration with the design and production process of the Tesla Model 3, capping the tweet off with the morose phrase, “car biz is hell.”
Then in September, California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA) opened three additional accident investigations in a month, including one in which an employee lost part of their finger. According to a statement made by a Tesla representative: “We proactively reported the incident to Cal-OSHA, and we're working closely with them to investigate the exact cause and make any necessary improvements.” The statement included a vow to improve Tesla’s safety measures until the company operated “the safest factories in the world."
The other two accidents reported to Cal-OSHA actually took place in late August: the date of the first accident was not specified but was reported to regulators August 30th, while the other happened on August 24th, and was reported on the 31st. The reports for these accidents were opened on September 4th and 5th respectively.
Considering Tesla’s high accident rates, countless production setbacks, and the obvious stress that Tesla employees at all levels of the company are under, it seems unbelievable that Tesla’s staff are not being pressured to push themselves beyond human limitations. In August, CtW Investment Group, a labor rights activist firm, sent Tesla (in addition to 30 other large companies) a letter asking for the public disclosure of the company’s employment practices.
Perhaps Tesla requires more than innovative approaches to safety…perhaps what they really need is to simply slow down a bit. It is easier to create effective safety practices for time-tested manufacturing practices; if your staff structure or the physical aspects of a plant floor are constantly changing, even if the changes are meant to be improvements, the resulting lack of consistency makes it hard to accurately test for the long-term effects of those changes. Because of that, however brilliant Tesla’s safety teams are, it’s likely they won’t be able to catch everything because there are some things you just won’t be able to see coming without taking enough time to each factor closely.
Even if they do, putting as much pressure as Tesla seems to be putting on its workers is always a surefire way to increase the risk of accidents. Traditional automotive plants are already hard to work in, let alone create safety measures that make them “the safest in the world.”