Home » Employment News » Tesla lays off hundreds of Autopilot workers in latest cuts

Tesla lays off hundreds of Autopilot workers in latest cuts

By Nithya Bose in Employment News, posted June 29, 2022

Tesla has laid off hundreds of its Autopilot team members after closing a factory in California.

The move is one of the largest reported cuts so far for Elon Musk's company as it carries out a broader labor reduction.

Around 200 employees were paid off, with many of them being data annotation professionals.

According to staff familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified because they were sharing private information, affected employees were contacted on Tuesday, June 28.

Teams in the San Mateo office were charged with analyzing client vehicle data relating to Autopilot driver-assistance technologies and doing data labelling.

The office employed around 350 people, some of whom were relocated to a nearby location.

Tesla did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

The redundancies are part of an effort by Tesla to lower the ranks of paid employees after a recent boom in recruiting.

As it established additional plants in Austin and Berlin, the corporation, now based in Austin, Texas, had expanded to around 100,000 people worldwide.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, surprised employees last month when he said that layoffs might be unavoidable due to the company's increasingly unstable fiscal situation.

Later, he indicated that around 10 percent of salaried employees will be let go in the following three months, however, the entire headcount might be higher in a year.

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Downsizing efforts by the market leader in electric vehicles have concentrated on departments that developed too rapidly.

Some human resources and software engineers have been laid off, and in some cases, the axing has affected individuals who had only been with the firm for a few weeks.

Those hit by the recent move worked on one of the prominent features in Tesla vehicles.

The electric-car maker has defined labeled data as an "essential element for training powerful Deep Neural Networks, which help drive the Tesla vehicles autonomously" in job ads.

Workers in Buffalo, New York, and San Mateo, California, spent hours identifying photographs of automobiles and their surroundings, such as street signs and traffic lanes.

Source: The Los Angeles Times

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