Tesla whistleblower describes dangerous understaffing while testing Full Self-Driving in Houston

Javier Medrano, a former Tesla fleet operations manager, filed a federal lawsuit alleging the company turned its Houston Full Self-Driving test fleet into 24/7 “rolling hazards” by aggressively scaling operations without adequate safety oversight. Medrano was the sole manager overseeing 38 vehicle operators across three shifts, a ratio of 38:1 that the suit says violated Tesla’s own mandated 15:1 safety baseline. Other cities with similar test fleets had multiple safety leads per shift.

The operators were part of Tesla’s “Rodeo Team,” whose existence was first reported by Business Insider in 2024. These drivers deliberately got autonomous vehicles into dangerous situations and intervened only at the last possible moment, generating training data for FSD. Medrano took over as sole operational manager eight months after joining Tesla in 2023. The fleet grew from 15 to 38 operators under his watch, but he received no additional supervisory staff despite repeated requests.

The breaking point came when an FSD test vehicle was involved in a collision at 2:05 AM. Medrano was so exhausted he answered the phone call “physically asleep” and gave erroneous advice to the operator, who remained at the scene and was allegedly approached by an impaired stranger. The next day Medrano told HR he had “no recollection” of the call. An HR representative allegedly told him to set his phone on Do Not Disturb if he did not want to be bothered during active testing shifts. His boss told him to “delegate better.” “I didn’t have anybody to delegate to,” Medrano told The Independent.

Tesla’s Austin robotaxis crash four times more than human drivers, and this lawsuit adds internal context to the safety record: a fleet operating beyond its own safety ratios, a sole manager working to exhaustion, and institutional responses that treated his distress signals as a time-management problem. Waymo launched a subscription service with a fleet that has dedicated safety teams at scale. Tesla’s Rodeo Team operated with one manager asleep at the controls. The lawsuit was filed after Medrano was fired. Tesla has not publicly commented on the allegations.