The engineer was attacked by the robot designed to grab and move freshly cast aluminum car parts at Tesla's Gigafactory Texas near Austin due to a malfunction, which forced two witnesses, who watched their fellow employee leaving a "trail of blood" after the attack, to hit the emergency shutdown button, the report said. The robot reportedly pinned down the engineers and sank its metal claws into the worker's back and arm, leaving a blood at the factory's surface and resulting in a "laceration, cut, open wound."
The newspaper cited Tesla as saying that the engineer's wounds required "zero" days off from work for recovery.
While Tesla reported no other robot-related injuries at the factory to authorities, the incident raises concerns over the risks of automated robots in the workplace, the report said, citing increased injuries due to robotic coworkers at Amazon shipment centers, killer droid-surgeons, self-driving cars and robotic chess instructors.
At the same time, the report cited Hannah Alexander, an attorney of the nonprofit Workers Defense Project who represents the factory's contract workers, as saying that she believed the amount of injuries suffered at the factory is going underreported, based on her conversations with the workers at the factory, adding that her advice is to "read that report with a grain of salt."