“Automotive engineers will say, in defending their performance, that every car is a compromise with economic and stylistic factors. This statement, if true, is also meaningless. For the significant question is, who authorizes what compromises of engineering safety?”

Ralph Nader, Unsafe at any Speed

Ralph Nader first came to public attention in 1965 with the publication of his book Unsafe at any Speed: the Designed in Dangers of the American Automobile. Nader’s book laid bare the reluctance of the US car industry to take product safety seriously, and the prevalence of designs that marketed well, but made accidents more common, and the accidents that did happen more likely to be fatal.

While Nader’s judgement on particular technical issues was to remain controversial, his focus on product safety met a receptive audience on Capitol Hill, leading to the establishment of what would become the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) less than a year later.

In 1971 Nader was to turn his attention to other kinds of public interest checks and balances, including the role of conscientious insiders in bringing evidence of wrongdoing into the public domain. It was his Washington DC Conference on Professional Responsibility that brought the term whistleblower into common use for the first time.

Lukasz Krupski’s story brings all of these threads together and does so at a time when we are witnessing a phase of revolutionary technological change, powered by artificial intelligence. Concerns about the safety and future trajectory of these technologies reached fever pitch in 2023, accompanied by questions about the degree of accountability innovators in this sector owe to governments and the public.

Few such companies are as visible as Tesla or its founder Elon Musk. Research conducted by the UK’s Ada Lovelace and Turing Institutes has found the autonomous, driverless functionality synonymous with Tesla’s vehicles is the single application of AI technology the British public is most worried about, with 72% of those surveyed reporting concerns.

Originally from Poland, Lukasz Krupski joined Tesla as a service technician in November 2018, tasked with preparing vehicles for delivery to customers in Norway. He was still in his probationary period at the company in March 2019 when a new Model 3 car caught fire, startlingly close to an area where customers were present.

Major disaster was averted only by Lukasz plunging his hand into the burning vehicle and disconnecting a malfunctioning fast charger. That act of bravery earned Lukasz a congratulatory email from Elon Musk, and an assurance that he could bring any issues he discovered straight to the top for attention.

There were indeed other issues Lukasz and his colleagues were concerned about - including the lack of fire extinguishers at the facility they worked at. Vehicles were being worked on too closely together, further increasing the risk of fire, and the high voltage battery tables did not seem suitable for the weight of the cars they were working on. These concerns were not only for the safety of workers; taking these measures would also have defended Tesla from risky and expensive mishaps that could seriously damage the firm’s hard-won reputation at the premium end of the car market.

Instead of company management thanking Lukasz for heading off potential disasters, the firm took a dim view of its eagle-eyed employee. Raising these problems caused Lukasz to be labelled as an insider threat and targeted by internal company surveillance. Later, he was moved to a less visible position and subjected to an official reprimand – all this only weeks after the Model 3 fire. The experience had a highly detrimental impact on Lukasz’s health. After a collapse and rush to hospital in September 2020, a doctor prescribed Lukasz several periods of sick leave.

In late 2021, Lukasz realised that – even as a service technician – he had access to a shockingly wide range of internal data at Tesla. Not only did access controls seem almost entirely absent, other lapses were evident in the data Lukasz was seeing: serious lapses that risked putting Tesla’s customers, and those sharing the roads with them, in danger.

This time, when Lukasz raised the alarm, he decided to make his report externally. In November 2021, Lukasz teamed up with a prominent Tesla critic to make a formal reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the NHTSA. Separately, the decision was taken by Tesla to dismiss Lukasz in December that year.

It was only on 26 May 2023 that German business paper Handelsblatt published explosive revelations about the company, informed by a leak of 100GB of internal data. Handelsblatt worked with the leaked data for six months before proceeding to publication of the Tesla Files. Handelsblatt reporters noted that the Tesla Files contain about 2300 documents, many of which include the personal identifying information of Tesla customers and employees (including that of Elon Musk himself).

Many other items in the document set, however, did not fall into that category and these included a collection of customer complaints about Tesla’s self-driving functionality.

Based on the documents revealed to Handelsblatt, Tesla’s customers complained with shocking frequency that vehicles with their driving assistance systems turned on were liable to break or accelerate suddenly - behaviour that has clear implications for the safety of Tesla drivers and everyone sharing the roads with them.

All in all, in the seven year period between 2015 and March 2022 the Tesla Files contained details of 2400 complaints about self-acceleration and more than 1500 problems with breaking. Not surprisingly, there were real-world impacts from this kind of malfunction, with 1000 reports of accidents in the files.

Handelsblatt confirmed many of these details by contacting the writers of complaints directly, many of whom were unhappy with the response they had received from Tesla. Other documents in the Tesla Files demonstrate that in fact the company was certainly aware of these problems. A leaked presentation dating from 2018 cited the ten most common problems affecting Tesla cars, acknowledging that unpredictable breaking and acceleration is the most serious of these issues, with possible dangers to the driver.

At the time of publication Lukasz’s role in the leak, which he made anonymously, was not publicly known. However, based on the details Handelsblatt contacted Tesla with ahead of publication, Tesla stated that it believed a former employee in a technical role had been responsible for the breach.

By this point, Tesla had launched two separate cases against Lukasz – one for the return of a company laptop and an injunction to stop any further distribution of internal data. On 1 June 2023, Lukasz’s home in Norway was searched by police and almost all of his electronic devices seized. Copies of this data remain in the custody of a Norwegian court, pending arguments from Lukasz’s legal team that he should be recognised as a whistleblower and that information relevant to those disclosures should not be passed on to Tesla.

The impact of Handelsblatt’s reporting has been wide-ranging. German and Dutch authorities (since Tesla’s European headquarters is based in the Netherlands) have launched data protection investigations into Tesla’s lack of protection for employee information. Separate class action suits centering on Tesla’s lack of internal data controls are being brought in Europe and the US. Not only that, the NHTSA – set up as a result of Ralph Nader’s concerns about US car manufacturers in the 1960s – has also expressed an interest in speaking to Lukasz.

The Tesla Files have informed the debate about automated robotics and regulation, primarily by showing that companies producing and applying these tools cannot necessarily be relied on to be open about their operation or their problems. Tesla’s driver assistance systems, like many such technologies, are hard for outsiders to evaluate. The public is reliant on Tesla’s own commitment to internal transparency and honesty with the public. Unfortunately, observers of the company have known for some time that dissenting voices have not always been welcomed, and there have been examples of whistleblowers being treated badly in the past.

Tesla fired Steven Henkes, who worked at the company’s solar panels division, after he went to regulators in 2019 with his concerns about fire risks. He said he had been effectively ignored for several years. In 2020, another former Tesla employee, Martin Tripp, agreed to pay the company US$400,000 in a legal settlement wherein he admitted violating computer crime and trades secrets laws by handing company information about the profligate use of raw materials to journalists.

New automation technologies, using AI and Machine Learning, create risk where there is little transparency, or accountability for problems. The disclosures Lukasz Krupski has brought into the public discussion are an early example of exactly this sort of risk.

As discussions about regulation of emerging technologies continue on the national, EU and global levels, it is clear that public confidence and product safety will require greater transparency on the part of companies like Tesla. Part of that transparency must be respect for and protection of whistleblowers in the public interest. For furthering that debate with all the means open to him, Lukasz Krupski is a deserving winner of the 2023 Blueprint Europe Whistleblowing Prize.

Photo credit: Michael Engelert for Handelsblatt