An internal investigation from Tesla identified a worker who allegedly "maliciously sabotaged" Tesla's Fremont plant resulting in a temporary shutdown, Bloomberg reports. The employee confessed and his employment terminated.
Tesla recently escaped a large-scale attack by a foreign hacker due to the incorruptibility of an employee in the battery Gigafactory in the US state of Nevada, but the company does not seem to be able to rely so well on everyone in its workforce: The Bloomberg news agency currently reports from an internal email that an employee at Tesla's Fremont electric car plant sabotaged production there in September. The responsible security team noticed this quickly so that further damage was prevented, the agency quotes from the letter from the Tesla legal advisor Ed Prescott.
What exactly happened in Fremont cannot be found in the excerpts from the e-mail and the Bloomberg article. However, the deliberately caused disruption only briefly affected operations at Tesla. After "a few hours", it says that production ran smoothly again. According to Bloomberg, no such incident was reported to the Fremont police until Tuesday, the FBI initially did not answer questions.
According to the internal Tesla mail, the employee who was caught tried to cover his tracks, blame a colleague, and destroy a computer. He was then confronted with "irrefutable evidence," finally confessed, and was released. You put great trust in your own employees, wrote the legal advisor, according to Bloomberg, but cases like the current one are "crimes, violations of our code of conduct and unfair to colleagues". Tesla is ready to aggressively defend the company and its employees.
Official statements from Tesla were not available on the incident, Bloomberg continues. The agency points out that CEO Elon Musk wrote about "sabotage" internally a few years ago. At the time, it was about an employee in the Gigafactory Nevada, with whom Tesla has been conducting litigation since then. According to Bloomberg, the information provided by Tesla and Musk was in part incorrect: It was alleged that the man was planning a firearms attack in the factory, but the police quickly determined that he was not a threat.
Armen Hareyan is the founder and the Editor in Chief of Torque News. He founded TorqueNews.com in 2010, which since then has been publishing expert news and analysis about the automotive industry. He can be reached at Torque News Twitter, Facebok, Linkedin and Youtube.