[AutonomousVehicles] Tesla lays off 200 Autopilot workers and closing office in San Mateo, CA

[Cornelius Butler]

Hi Everyone,
Tesla just laid off 200 people who work on the Autopilot team and closed an
office that focuses on it. This is part of the company's overall 10 percent
reduction in staff company wide.

The article and link are below.

Article LInk:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/28/tesla-cutting-200-jobs-closing-autopilot-office-in-san-mateo.html

Article Text:

Tesla is cutting about 200 Autopilot jobs and closing office in San Mateo,
California
PUBLISHED TUE, JUN 28 20229:41 PM EDT
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Lora Kolodny

Tesla is closing its office in San Mateo, California, and eliminating an
estimated 200 jobs there, CNBC has confirmed, as part of a broader
cost-cutting effort at the electric vehicle company.

At the San Mateo facility, hundreds of employees were tasked with labeling
videos from the company’s cars in order to improve their driver assistance
systems, marketed as Autopilot. Bloomberg first reported on the office
closure and layoffs.

Two employees impacted by the layoffs told CNBC on Tuesday that they knew
Tesla’s lease was approaching its end. The workers asked not to be named
because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter.

Tesla, which has yet to deliver on its promise of robotaxi technology,
previously moved a number of its Autopilot data employees to its location
in Palo Alto, California. The company has also been hiring and training
data annotation teams in Buffalo, New York. Some San Mateo office employees
had trained the teams in Buffalo, the staffers said.

The typical data annotation job at Tesla involves identifying and
describing objects in short clips that were captured by cameras and sensors
on Tesla vehicles. Data labelers sometimes need to identify overlapping
objects, like a wheel in front of a curb or a pedestrian obstructing the
full view of a stop sign. They’re rated on how many clips they can
accurately annotate over short periods of time.

Most developers of driver assistance and automated driving systems
outsource at least some of their data labeling work to companies like
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Cloudfactory, Hive AI and Appen.

One employee told CNBC that much of the staff in San Mateo had expected to
be moved to Palo Alto or to another office, but not to lose their jobs.

CNBC also obtained an audio recording of a meeting on Tuesday, during which
a manager told the Tesla Autopilot data teams about the layoffs.

“You knew our lease was ending here in San Mateo,” the manager said. She
told the workers that the company did its best to try to bring the entire
Autopilot team that was in the San Mateo office to the new location in Palo
Alto.

“Unfortunately, we couldn’t,” she said. “So what that means is we have a
restructure in place and your positions were impacted.”

Employees at the meeting were told they would be paid in full for the next
60 days, but June 28 would be their last working day. They were asked to
immediately leave their laptops and badges at their desks, and were
informed that emails with severance and benefits information would be in
their inbox.

Severance packages are expected to include compensation based on years
served at the company and an additional two months of benefits, extending
coverage through Oct. 31.

As CNBC previously reported, Tesla is in the midst of cutting around 10% of
its salaried headcount. However, it plans to add more hourly workers over
time.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in an interview published last week that Tesla’s
new factories in Texas and Berlin were losing “billions of dollars” partly
due to supply chain disruptions that were hampering the company’s ability
to increase production in both facilities.

“Both Berlin and Austin factories are gigantic money furnaces right now,”
Musk said in the interview recorded on May 30, with a company-sanctioned
fan club called Tesla Owners Silicon Valley. “It should be like a giant
roaring sound which is the sound of money on fire.”
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