Tesla closes an office as layoff hits Autopilot jobs, including hourly ones

By Hyunjoo Jin

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Tesla has shuttered its workplace in San Mateo, California and laid off roughly 200 staff engaged on its Autopilot driver-assistant system there, one of many individuals instructed Reuters, in a transfer seen as accelerating cost-cutting.

Many of the laid-off individuals had been hourly staff, that individual stated.

Early this month, Tesla Chief Government Elon Musk instructed high managers he had a “tremendous unhealthy feeling” concerning the economic system and that the maker of electrical automobiles wanted to chop employees by about 10%.

Later, the billionaire stated that the ten% cuts would apply solely to salaried staff and that hourly employees numbers had been nonetheless anticipated to develop.

“Tesla clearly is in a serious cost-cutting mode,” stated Raj Rajkumar, professor {of electrical} and laptop engineering at Carnegie Mellon College. “This (employees discount) possible signifies that 2Q 2022 has been fairly tough on the corporate as a result of shutdown in Shanghai, uncooked materials prices and provide chain issues.”

Anti-pandemic measures in Shanghai have depressed Tesla’s manufacturing there.

The laid-off one that spoke to Reuters stated staff on the satellite tv for pc workplace had beforehand been instructed that they might transfer to an workplace in Palo Alto in levels starting this month after the San Mateo lease expired. However a lot of the staff had been laid off on Tuesday.

“It was positively sort of numbing,” he stated. “Yeah, we’re positively shocked; we’re positively blindsided.”

Some staff anticipated Tesla to shift a few of the jobs to lower-wage staff in Buffalo, New York, to avoid wasting prices.

Tesla didn’t instantly reply to a Reuters request for remark.

Many individuals in Tesla’s San Mateo workplace work on information annotation – reviewing and labeling numerous visuals collected from Tesla automobiles to show the automobiles’ Autopilot system the way to deal with sure sorts of highway eventualities.

Numerous Tesla information annotation staff stated on Linkedin on Tuesday that they’d been laid off.

“So sort of a disappointing day right this moment. Myself together with nearly the entire San Mateo Department at Tesla simply bought laid off,” Caeser Rosas, an information annotation specialist, stated on a Linkedin put up.

Bloomberg first reported concerning the San Mateo job cuts.

Musk has additionally stated Tesla’s new factories in Texas and Berlin are “gigantic cash furnaces” shedding billions of {dollars}.

(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Modifying by Bradley Perrett)