Nearly 200 employees have been let go by Tesla, and the San Mateo, California office where they worked has been closed. Tesla has completely dismantled the data annotation team working on Autopilot.
Bloomberg was the first to announce the layoffs, and individuals who spoke to TechCrunch under the condition of anonymity have confirmed them.
The job losses are part of a larger one at Tesla.
These layoffs, however, specifically targeted workers who had previously been considered essential to the business’s Autopilot advanced driver assistance system and, more significantly, Elon Musk, the CEO, who was working to further develop automated driving features through the $12,000 optional FSD system.
Up to this point, Tesla employed hundreds of people in San Mateo and Buffalo, New York, to work on the Autopilot team.
The San Mateo office had 276 employees; after firing 195 individuals across all levels, including managers, labellers, and data analysts, the team is down to 81 employees, who, according to sources, will be transferred to another location.
According to one source, the majority of the workers were employed in low-paying, somewhat low-skill tasks like Autopilot data labelling, which entails verifying whether Tesla’s computer correctly detected an object.
The insider mentioned that there had been rumours about this team’s layoffs for months and that the work would be transferred to Buffalo.