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Lukasz Krupski

March 10, 2026

AIWI / Case Studies / Lukasz Krupski

Lukasz Krupski

Lukasz was a service engineer at a Tesla service facility in Norway (2018-2021), responsible for preparing vehicles for delivery to customers. He raised concerns about the company’s self-driving car technology, as well as violations of company conduct related to safety concerns. He faced retaliation after reporting his concerns internally, and approached regulators before being dismissed from the company in 2021. He went public with his concerns in 2023 and has won two legal cases against Tesla, though other disputes with the company remain ongoing.

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Company

Tesla

Jurisdiction

Norway and US

Year

2021 - ongoing

Issues

Product Safety Risks

Lack of safety precautions, autopilot car feature

Channels

Internal → External

Regulatory and Public

Why This Case Matters

Lukasz has won two legal cases against Tesla, though other legal disputes between him and the company remain ongoing. In total, Lukasz was awarded ~£10,000 GBP in compensation. While welcome, this does not come near to reinstating him for the loss of earnings he suffered as a result of his whistleblowing. He is currently unemployed and is crowdfunding to cover living and legal expenses.

Several US regulatory actions were taken against Tesla, with many relating to the company’s self-driving technology. A recall of two million vehicles was announced in December 2023, with an NHTSA (part of the US Department of Transportation) investigation following in 2024 after four crashes involving autopilot functionality. Several investigations are ongoing as of late 2025.

The case called into question wider regulatory changes outside of the US. Self-driving or partly autonomous driver-assist technologies are still not permitted in the EU. Nevertheless, in the wake of the NHTSA investigations, the European Transport Safety Council has called for a body with similar powers to be set up in Europe.

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Timeline

Tesla’s self-driving car technology has been an important marketing tool for the company, but what happens behind the scenes might surprise many of its customers. The responsibilities of Tesla’s local service engineers typically involve significant work that goes beyond the usual tire pressure and trim checks. Shortly after joining Tesla in 2018, Lukasz Krupski was called to assist at a motor show where a group of vehicles was being readied for delivery.

What should have been a routine, though hectic, job nearly turned into a major disaster. During the pre-check phase, one of the components in a Model 3 sedan caught fire. The ultimate cause of the problem was an error one of Lukasz’s colleagues had made while modifying the vehicle’s charging mechanism [1].

Lukasz took immediate, dramatic action to prevent a wider fire in a hall that contained 100s of Tesla vehicles, with a group of customers nearby. He plunged his arm into the vehicle and pulled out the damaged component, suffering burns in the process. In an email to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Lukasz’s manager commended his actions. 

At first, Tesla’s response to Lukasz was positive, if informal and highly personalised. He received a personal email from Elon Musk, thanking him for his swift action and inviting any further feedback to be sent to him directly [2]. Lukasz then alerted Musk to the presence of flammable items in the service area and the lack of fire extinguishers, which Musk acknowledged.

There were other clear safety issues, which caused serious risks for Lukasz’s colleagues. Vehicles were being worked on without safe distances being established and the service platforms for the high-risk work of moving high-voltage batteries did not seem suitable for the weight of the cars being worked on [3]. 

Notwithstanding that Lukasz’s actions had led to him being hospitalised, he began to experience workplace retaliation in very short order. A matter of weeks after his exchange with Musk, Lukasz noticed that internal company surveillance (CODE42 and later CrowdStrike) had been installed on his work laptop. His immediate manager told him that his emails to Musk outlining what could be improved had caused problems with the CEO [4]. He was then moved to a less visible position and issued with an official workplace sanction.

Just as Tesla had no formal whistleblowing channels, the company had an absence of protections or procedures for those who raised issues. No internal mechanisms existed whereby Lukasz could assert his right not to experience workplace detriment as a result of his whistleblowing. He was also not offered protection from workplace bullying or threats of violence.

Lukasz had joined Tesla because he believed in the future of electric vehicles and the company’s ability to advance and popularise the technology. The retaliation he experienced was demoralising and stressful. Not surprisingly, the experience had a highly detrimental impact on Lukasz’s health and his doctors recommended he go on sick leave in September 2020.

In late 2021, Lukasz became aware of another example of company standards being violated. This time, the concern was in the protection of internal company data, including personal details of employees and customers. He discovered that, even as a service engineer, there were essentially no limits to the company information he could access.

Company information that Lukasz could access included Elon Musk’s own personal data. But his concerns were not limited to data protection. Among that company data were invoices for surveillance technology and investigation services aimed at employees whom the company considered “insider threats.”

Lukasz also found that multiple safety-critical customer complaints had been effectively ignored over a number of years. These included reports of Tesla vehicles either accelerating or applying the brakes unpredictably when autopilot functionality was active. The results of this kind of malfunction were potentially fatal. 

By this point, Lukasz understood what the repercussions would be for trying to make a report about this within the company. He approached regulators, making reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the specialist vehicle regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in November 2021 [5], [6]. The following month, Lukasz was dismissed from Tesla.

Anxious that the issues he had found should receive proper attention, Lukasz approached German business paper Handelsblatt anonymously, with 2300 internal company documents. These included details of 2400 customer complaints about unpredictable acceleration made between 2015 and March 2022 and 1500 about unexpected braking. Not surprisingly, there were real-world impacts from this kind of malfunction, with 1000 reports of accidents in the files.

Handelsblatt investigated the story for six months before launching their Tesla Files investigation on 23 May 2023 [7]. Journalists approached a range of Tesla customers who had made safety-critical complaints. They confirmed the complaints they had made and that Tesla had not given an adequate response. Among the documents in the Tesla Files was a 2018 presentation evidencing that for years, Tesla had knowledge of the complaints and how serious they were.

Outcomes

For the Whistleblower

After Handelsblatt contacted Tesla for comment, the company came to its own conclusions about who the ultimate source of the information was. The company launched two separate cases against Lukasz – one seeking an order for the return of a company laptop and evidence collection, and another 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 were seized. Copies of this data were lodged with a Norwegian court, pending arguments from his legal team that he should be recognised as a whistleblower and that information relevant to those disclosures should not be passed on to Tesla.

In November 2023, Lukasz  finally felt able to go public, at which point his disclosures began to receive attention from major English-language media including the New York Times and the BBC [8]. 

Since then, he has had several victories in court that show how European whistleblower protection laws can provide some protection against retaliation and SLAPPs from major US companies. Lukasz and his lawyers sought legal remedy on two distinct issues: firstly the injunction that stopped him sharing information with authorities in furtherance of his whistleblowing and, secondly, a legal action against Tesla for the retaliation he had experienced. 

In July 2024, a Norwegian district court overturned Tesla’s injunction stopping Lukasz from sharing data with regulators or the media. The court acknowledged that, since Lukasz was a whistleblower, the ban represented an undue interference with his Article 10 ECHR rights [9]. That December, he also won his second legal case. Tesla was found to have unlawfully discriminated against the whistleblower and ordered to pay compensation and cover of his legal costs [10].

In total, Lukasz was awarded 150,000 Norwegian Kroner (about 10,000 pounds sterling) in compensation. While welcome, this does not come near to reinstating him for the loss of earnings he suffered as a result of his whistleblowing.

Lukasz’s legal disputes with Tesla remain ongoing. At the end of 2025, a Norwegian Appeal Court reaffirmed that Tesla had to pay Lukasz’s legal costs related to challenging the injunction. The company was also ordered to delete information gathered during the June 2023 raid on Lukasz’s home and cover all related legal costs. 

Consequences faced:

Note:

Lukasz Krupski provided confirmation that these were the consequences he has faced from whistleblowing.

For the Case

In the months after the Handelsblatt investigation, a number of regulatory actions against Tesla were announced in the US, many of them related to the company’s self-driving technology. A recall of two million vehicles was announced in December 2023 [11].

In October 2024 NHTSA opened a full investigation into Tesla’s self-driving technology following four crashes in the US where autopilot functionality was involved [12]. Several investigations are still ongoing as of late 2025 [13].

Self-driving or partly autonomous driver-assist technologies are not permitted in the EU. Nevertheless, in the wake of the NHTSA investigations, the European Transport Safety Council has called for a body with similar powers to be set up in Europe [14].

Tesla’s technology has also come to the attention of the US judicial system. In August 2025, a Florida jury found that self-driving functionality was partly at fault in a 2019 incident that claimed the life of one pedestrian and injured another. Tesla was ordered to pay significant damages, though it is challenging the ruling [15]. Accidents that appear to have been autopilot-related have also received attention outside the US. At least two cases have been investigated in Norway [16].

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