Tesla Lays Off Nearly 200 Autopilot Employees
American Tesla Inc closes one of the offices in Silicon Valley and fires about 200 employees.
The announcement revealed that it will close the San Mateo office, which has increased the Autopilot driver assistance system, and lay off more than half of the office’s staff (about 200 people).
The cuts come amid wider job cuts at Tesla. However, these layoffs have targeted personnel once considered critical to Autopilot’s advanced driver assistance system and, more importantly, CEO Elon Musk’s efforts to further develop automated driving features with an optional $12,000 FSD system.
According to one source, most of the workers were doing moderately low-skilled, low-paying jobs, such as labeling autopilot data, which involves determining whether Tesla’s algorithm has identified an object well or badly.
The source noted that, according to rumors, layoffs for this team have been expected for several months, and that the work will be transferred to Buffalo.
The sources confirm that the 195 Autopilot team members who were fired on Tuesday were indeed fired, they also say that most of the “layoffs” that began at the end of May were actually performance-based layoffs.
