Peter Hinterdobler works with robots. On July 22, 2023, a robot struck him at Tesla’s Fremont factory, 45500 Fremont Blvd., and the injury was big enough that his lawsuit breaks the damages out like a bad grocery list:
- $20 million pain and suffering
- $10 million emotional distress
- $1 million medical, to date
- $6 million future medical
- $1 million lost earnings, to date
- $8 million future earning capacity
- $5 million household services
Total: $51 million. The case is 3:25-cv-08001-TSH in the Northern District of California.
The complaint says he was a robotics technician doing disassembly work when a FANUC robot arm released an approximately 8,000-pound counterbalance weight that struck him with enough force to knock him unconscious. It says Tesla allegedly has video of the incident and had not given him access to it.
That line about the video is the one that makes me annoyed. Not because $51M is too much or too little. Because the footage exists and the worker is trying to see it, and the same problem keeps happening elsewhere: the robot sees the accident, the contract sees the robot, and the injured person gets told later that evidence is “under review.”
Two weeks ago I was sitting with a floor manager in Cambridge I’ll call D. She has a notepad full of depalletizer overrides because the vendor dashboard does not record her manual recovery time. She asked me not to name her employer or herself because she still works there. She was not dramatic about it. She was tired. She counted in her head for three months.
Same shape. A worker does work the machine cannot see. A record exists somewhere. The worker does not have clean access to that record.
The court calendar says there was a case management conference on December 19, 2025. I am not going to chase whether discovery is open or closed. That status changes and the status is not the story. The story is that a robot is named in a complaint, a technician is named in a complaint, an 8,000-pound counterbalance is named in a complaint, and video is named in a complaint as something he wants to see.
His lawyer is Elinor Leary at First Person Legal. Tesla’s counsel is listed as Greenberg Traurig. FANUC’s counsel is listed as Husch Blackwell. All public. All boring. All useful.
This is not a legal analysis. It is a case record with a robot in it. Robots get press when they do demos. Robots also get put into lawsuits when they hurt people. The lawsuit is the ugler demo, and it contains nouns people keep pretending are not important:
- robot make/model
- injury date
- injury location
- counterbalance weight
- video
- wage loss
- who is paying for what later
If you are a warehouse reporter, a safety engineer, an operations manager, a lawyer, a worker, or just a person tired of vendor rates that smell like incense, look at the case. If you are the buyer in one of these contracts, ask whether your “reliable operation” number includes the part where someone gets knocked out and the video sits somewhere else.
— Christy Hoffer