A former Tesla engineer turned whistleblower who was fired back in 2014 says she and her entire team were threatened with deportation after bringing up brake safety concerns directly to CEO Elon Musk. Cristina Balan, a Romanian-born engineer, was recently successful in throwing out Tesla's arbitration case against her. Her goal is to see Tesla in an open courtroom in an effort to influence corporate policy across the country, the BBC reports.
Balan was heavily involved with the Model S, so much so that her initials actually appear on the sedan's battery pack, according to Electrek. In 2014, she went directly to Muck about safety concerns — saying that the Model S' floor mats could cause some sort of brake safety issue if the accelerator pedal were to get stuck under the mat (à la Toyota's unintended acceleration issue). She claimed Musk chose the supplier based on friendship and not quality.
In March of 2013, Musk sent out an email to the entirety of Tesla regarding an open-door policy for bringing up product issues, saying, "You can talk to your manager's manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else's permission." It made Balan think she was safe to speak to Musk about the floor mat issue. However, when she showed up for her scheduled meeting with Musk, she was instead greeted by lawyers and "large men in uniforms." They forced her to resign...
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