Workers Training Tesla’s Autopilot Say They Were Told to Ignore Road Signs to Avoid Making Cars Drive Like a "Robot"

"Those were the [kinds] of things that made me and my coworkers uncomfortable."

Stop Sign

In an exposé on Tesla's toxic workplace culture, a worker tasked with training Autopilot data said they were often advised by their superiors to ignore road signs.

In an essay dictated to Business Insider, a current Autopilot employee whose name was not revealed to protect their job security said that at the Buffalo facility where they work, there was sometimes pressure to ignore certain rules of the road to make the system drive less like a "robot."

"There were some times we were told to ignore 'No Turn on Red' or 'No U-Turn' signs," the employee said. "Those were the [kinds] of things that made me and my coworkers uncomfortable."

While their bosses would sometimes hear the workers out about their concerns — which others also discussed in the website's larger exposé — their agita often fell on deaf ears.

"The general response was along the lines of 'Mind your business and your pay grade,'" the current employee said.

Sharing is Caring

The worker told BI that they began working at the Buffalo Autopilot data center in 2022 and came in with no experience in the automotive or electric vehicle field beforehand.

As such, it's likely that they didn't realize the formerly common employee practice of sharing amusing or disturbing clips they came across over the course of their workdays was so ethically fraught.

Generally, people would just share videos of "odd things they saw," but one time, the worker said, a coworker "took it too far."

"He shared a clip of a little boy who'd been hit by a Tesla while riding his bike," the employee said. "I thought that was sadistic."

Last year, Reuters revealed that workers in these Tesla offices were secretly sharing "intimate" clips with each other, which apparently led to an internal crackdown on the practice. Autopilot workers were no longer able to see images outside their own team's servers, and some of the images were watermarked to better track where they came from if they were leaked.

Despite essentially telling employees "If you're caught once, that's your ticket out the door," some people have apparently kept it up.

"Sometimes people still pass images around the office, especially if it's something out of the ordinary," the employee said, "but it doesn't happen as often."

All told, this worker said that they have become disillusioned with the company they once thought would be a great career opportunity.

Now, as they told BI, they feel that Tesla is a "dystopian company."

More on Tesla's automation: Tesla's Full Self-Driving Still Doesn't Even Work in a Single Lane Tunnel