A former Tesla manager who ran the company’s “Full Self-Driving” test fleet in Houston says the operation was so understaffed that its cars became “rolling hazards on public streets,” according to a lawsuit.
The manager, Javier Medrano, filed the wrongful-termination complaint in Houston federal court, and its contents were reported this week. He oversaw the fleet before Tesla launched its driverless “Robotaxi” in the city.
One manager, 38 vehicles, three shifts
Tesla runs fleets of test vehicles with human safety operators to develop and validate “Full Self-Driving.” Houston’s was the groundwork that fed into Tesla launching its Robotaxi in Houston and Dallas in April.
Medrano says he became the sole operational manager of that Houston program by mid-2024. Then Tesla roughly doubled his load, from 15 vehicles and operators to 38, across three 24-hour shifts.
The complaint calls that a “dangerous 38:1 operator-to-manager ratio” that blew past Tesla’s own “mandated 15:1 safety baseline.” Other test cities had multiple safety leads. Houston had Medrano.
His job included auditing camera footage, running weekly ride-alongs, and investigating incidents. For 38 cars running around the clock, alone, that’s not a job one person does. He says the result was a “breakdown in safety oversight and extreme exhaustion.”
‘Trying not to lose my absolute mind’
Test drivers worked 60 to 80 hours a week on average and stayed on-call through weekends, according to the filing. Medrano describes his own state bluntly: “trying not to lose my absolute mind, from not sleeping or eating correctly.” He says he sent an S.O.S. asking for time off in March 2025.
Then came the incident. On March 30, 2025, at 2:05 a.m., one of the autonomous test vehicles hit a member of the public. Medrano got the emergency call, but says he was so sleep-deprived he “processed the phone call while physically asleep” and gave unsafe guidance. He later reported having “no recollection” of it. The operator stayed at the scene for about an hour.
When he raised staffing concerns in February 2025, Medrano says leadership handed him a performance ultimatum instead of hiring help. He says an HR representative told him to put his phone on “Do Not Disturb” rather than fix the understaffing.
Fired, then replaced by three people
Tesla fired Medrano on May 1, 2025. The Autopilot director blamed him for not delegating, per the complaint, and a stock award set to vest days later was stripped.
After firing him, Tesla promoted one of his subordinates into the role and brought in two more team leads from Dallas. So the help he says he’d been asking for showed up right after he was gone.
Medrano, who filed the complaint himself, now works for a rival EV company. He’s seeking reinstatement, back pay, and damages. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
The suit lands as Tesla faces mounting litigation over its driver-assist and self-driving systems, most of it tied to crashes. This one is different. It comes from the inside, from the person Tesla put in charge of keeping the test fleet safe.
Electrek’s Take
Take this for what it is: one side of a wrongful-termination case, unproven, from a plaintiff representing himself, with Tesla staying silent to media requests, as per usual. The specifics could shift once Tesla answers.
However, everything in the complaint is believable and in line with what we know about Tesla’s “move fast, break things” approach.
Tesla, by Medrano’s account, set its own safety standard, a 15:1 ratio, and then doubled the load past it while running cars 24 hours a day on public streets. If that’s accurate, it’s a company overriding a limit it wrote itself, on the exact program meant to prove these cars are safe enough to run without a driver.
We’ve argued for a while that safety validation, not convenience, is the real bottleneck for Tesla’s robotaxi plans. A lawsuit alleging that validation in Houston came down to one exhausted person auditing 38 cars fits that concern uncomfortably well.
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