Very high number of workplace accidents at Tesla factory in Germany

in the workplace? definitely

edited to clarify I am referring to Tesla facilities.

Of course each emergency is one too much, but I wonder what are the sample sizes? Are the counts statistically significantly different from each other? Another thing to consider: Emergencies are rare events and so a small difference in circumstances can make the outcomes vary substantially. Is a well oiled manufacturing pipeline like a Audi factory comparable to a new factory that has not rounded all sharp corners yet?

move fast and break limbs!

A more fair comparison would be to the Audi factory in its first year of operation.

Not necessarily a bad thing. There's often a strong negative correlation between incident rate and fatality rate, a pattern found across many industries (airline, oil and gas, manufacturing etc.)

For example, are more incidents reported by British Airlines or Aeroflot? Now, which would you rather fly on?

Workplace accidents are legally required to be reported in all of America, per OSHA regulations. There are definitely issues with compliance in some situations, but I guarantee that the OSHA inspectors take this sort of thing seriously.

Even paper cuts for office workers, I kid you not. While this, paper cuts, may sound excesive, the system allows forba close, and reliable, monitoring of the more serious accidents. So it is a good thing.

I thought only those has to be reported, which would cause you to miss more than 3 days of work.

I think I read that somewhere, but not certain!

I initially put it down to different levels of reporting for things like papercuts etc

However no

"factory requested an ambulance or helicopter 247 times in the first year after opening alone"

That's crazy, 5 times a week

Staplerfahrer Klaus is such a clasic stereotype of the avenge German middleclass worker, it's now a meme that Germans love to relax by playing Forklift Simulator after work.

https://imgur.com/a/AkkLzVE

He left the man cut in half on the ground while he moved on to his next assignment lol.

That might cause some unintended friction which will cause over regulation and ultimately cause longer delays in the long term.

Ok let's ruin people lives for profit. Go take a look at an emergency room when somebody gets injured.

Sure, let other people suffer for my moral ideals and profits. Hell, we really didn't learn a single bit from the industrial revolution, did we?

I guess Musk could walk down Holiwood Boulevard and kill someone without loosing a single fan at this point...

Accelerating the adoption of electric cars is not necessarily a good thing, for the planet or its people.

God damn, keyboard warrior... why don't you go to work where a 50kg box may fall onto your head any time?

Also you pay for a blue tick on Twitter. Yuck.

Damn, you are really ok with an elevated injury rate for the sake of, “progress”? I guess I’m solidly a Luddite then.

> Tesla’s workplace safety stats and their rate of progress are inextricably linked.

Why do you believe its impossible they could achieve just as much with fewer accidents?

Is it possible that God Emperor Musk has permitted some degree of negligence in his operation?

> Tesla accelerated the mass adoption of electric cars by at least a decade

That is a VERY bold claim given that Tesla sedans only began sales 11 years ago.

> Tesla’s workplace safety stats and their rate of progress are inextricably linked. If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.

That claim is even more bold. Other car companies are ramping up their electric assembly lines even faster than Tesla did in Germany with even less experience in electric car production. Shouldn't it follow that they should be maiming their workers at an incredible pace?

Is there any reason to believe that design and technology innovation is linked to a higher injury rate in serial production? Shouldn't TSMCs chip factories be veritable slaughterhouses with that logic?

It's not at all obvious that the 3x injury rate is in fact the cost of such progress.

> Tesla accelerated the mass adoption of electric cars by at least a decade. Tesla’s workplace safety stats and their rate of progress are inextricably linked. If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.

I strongly disagree with that argument.

A related argument with which I disagree is the one that people sometimes invoke to respond to accusations of exploited workers: arguing that the workers' lives were still generally elevated over what they would be, were the factory not there and exploiting them.

I'm not sure electric cars quicker is a good thing unless it is somehow also a faster path to less cars.

How many bodies should we toss into the progress furnace

> If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.

put your money where your mouth is: go work there, taking the risk yourself, but it is at least unethical to talk about other people's health this way.

(Parent comment was dead, but I vouched for it, even though I disagree with it. It represents some not-unusual beliefs, and I think we'd be better off if those beliefs were talked about.)

An extremely well funded company willing to lose money on every sale thus delaying incumbents' investments by years could actually be blamed for slowing adoption just as easily as praised for speeding it.

People and non-person things are not clearly distinguishable beyond a certain level of abstraction and/or fixation on profit.

Polite & reasonable idea: HN is flying no "Eternal Champion of Truth and Justice" banners on its masthead. Nor is it turning a tidy profit from all the advertising and annual membership fees here. Nor is it under any legal obligation to favor/disfavor people or ideas which many of the users here might like/dislike. Mr. Musk is very wealthy, and has an irrationally nasty side. Our Fair Leader Paul Graham may not care to be our "Pay any Legal Bill, Bear any Anger" meat shield when topics come up that could draw unwelcome attention in his direction.

Safety is the responsibility of leadership.

>“That’s our other rule,” Musk continues. “Safety third. There’s not even a Rule Number Two. But even though there’s nothing in second place, safety is not getting promoted to number two.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...

Yes, it's truly unfair that Tesla is being associated with him!

Media has to plant a narrative, or why write the article?

Sure, and even with all of California's safety consciousness, Tesla's plant there saw double the industry average number of days lost to injury (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...).

Because they are safer.

Audi lists a volume of 332,981 vehicles for Ingolstadt in 2022.

https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/audi-in-ingolstadt-5543

Tesla posted a tweet regarding 5000 vehicles in one week in Gruenheide on March 25, 2023. That pace would be 260,000 vehicles over 52 weeks.

https://insideevs.com/news/659190/tesla-giga-berlin-producti...

I will say that the Audi Ingolstadt campus does have more than just line manufacturing.

If you weren't around at the time, it's hard to describe just how absolutely pervasive the ridicule of this woman was. It was a daily thing for quite a long time. Looking back at it makes me sick.

Bad article. From your link " And McDonald’s began changing how it heats up its coffee."

This is contradicted by wikipedia, which says McDonalds continues to heat their coffee that hot, and that Starbucks and other coffee shops do as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

> Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C),[40] relying on more sternly worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability, though it continues to face lawsuits over hot coffee.[40][41] The Specialty Coffee Association of America supports improved packaging methods rather than lowering the temperature at which coffee is served. The association has successfully aided the defense of subsequent coffee burn cases.[41] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C).[citation needed]

This case seems to have myths inside myths. The first order myth is that the lawsuit was bogus. But there's a second order myth, that the temperature of the coffee was unusually hot and they've since changed this. What is true is that the coffee was hot enough to cause severe third degree burns, requiring skin grafts, and that McDonald's coffee cups at that time were prone to spontaneous collapse. But the coffee was not unusually hot; coffee hot enough to cause those kind of burns is the norm. In fact even coffee substantially cooler than that can cause third degree burns, particularly with children and the elderly. Look up scald charts, 140 F / 60 C can cause third degree burns with only 5 seconds of exposure.

Some are, but I never mistook a boiling big gulp for user error.

There's a CTO here who used to seal McD's grease drums at night by jumping on them. Son of store owner.

it's for diecasting. just gooogle dosing furnace diecasting

"Dosing furnaces are closed holding furnaces with a spout for direct metal delivery. They are used to dispense an accurate amount of molten metal into the die casting machine. The advantage of dosing furnaces is that because it is closed, it minimizes heat loss and protects the molten metal from excessive oxidation."

Good question. A dosing oven is normally an oven which doses out a particular amount of product to be baked (such as for example bread etc). It could be something automotive (paint/plastic curing, etc.) or it’s not completely beyond the realms of possibility that this is a conventional bread dough dosing oven (see VW part 199 398 500 A), but seems unlikely.

You wouldn't walk on a dosing oven in the usual course of events. However, it is totally possible that someone was up there doing maintenance or debugging (let me drop a temperature probe in there to test if the ovens built in temperature measurement is accurate!)

A human foot has no place walking above melted aluminum. Since I don't think that anyone was reckless enough to design such a route, let alone this design pass multiple sign offs, chances that someone found and used some shortcut are not small.

That's not an inevitable property of the universe, that's a culture.

I did tech at a mechanical/electrical/plumbing contractor called US Engineering in KC. The union (unions?) and Corporate worked pretty well together, because they had to. Aggressive subcontractor bidding means you only get a few percentage points of profit on each job, the unions fight to get their fair share knowing that if they fight too hard they make the company brittle and they don't want the company to fold, indeed it was kind of shocking to hear people taking some pride (even in jest) at making the CEO and his family some cash.

But the biggest thing was, Believe In Zero. Huge push, lots of concerns that all of the new hires in new regions working on data centers did not understand this long-held cultural expectation. It's to believe in zero “unsafe behaviors,” things like turning with one foot when you get off a ladder (instead of planting both feet on the ground and then turning). Even if “Believe In Zero” was the corporate side, the unions were committed to “yeah that's what we do” and typical welders would remind me that they are working with thousand pound plumbing assemblies, cutters that need to slice these massive pipes open, and of course day-in-day-out they are going to be staring at the plasma of a welding torch melting this stuff back together—“all any of us want to do is to have some pride in our work, get a fair paycheck, and get home safe and healthy,” they'd say.

Why would Corporate care, why would the unions push so hard for how you step off of a ladder? Because if you roll your ankle or yank the ladder towards you, could create an injury, that requires paperwork for OSHA, then the insurance company will look at that paperwork to try and argue that they should get more money because you are not a five star super-safe workplace, even if they are not paying that much for the actual incidents. And when your margin is only a couple of percentage points, you can't be spending half of it on insurance.

So they did. Heck even I got into it. One thing I did to “Believe In Zero” was to cover up all of the exposed nails or splintery plywood in the corner where we stored soda. Sure “no reasonable person is going to run their hand across these surfaces”, but hey, you never know, maybe someone spills a coffee and someone else slips on it, if it's just 10 minutes for me to fix it now, and I can be thinking about how I want to structure a module while I am doing it, why leave it?