Tesla closed its office in San Mateo, California, and laid off about 200 employees who worked there on the Autopilot driver assistance system, Reuters reported, citing its sources.
Earlier this month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told top executives that he had a “very bad feeling” about the economy and that the electric car manufacturer needed to cut staff by about 10%.
Later, the billionaire said that the 10 percent reduction will affect only employees and hourly headcount is still expected to grow.
“Tesla is clearly in serious cost-cutting mode,” said Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “This (staff reduction) probably indicates that the 2nd quarter of 2022 was quite difficult for the company due to the shutdown in Shanghai, raw material costs, and supply chain problems.”
The fired person, in an interview with Reuters, said that employees of the support office had previously announced a phased move to an office in Palo Alto, starting this month after the lease in San Mateo expired. But most of the workers were laid off on Tuesday.
Some workers expected Tesla to move some jobs to low-paying jobs in Buffalo, New York, to cut costs.
Many people in the Tesla office in San Mateo are working on data annotation – they view and label various images collected from Tesla cars in order to teach the automotive autopilot system to cope with certain road scenarios. According to the source of the publication, most of the dismissed worked hourly.