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Tesla is restructuring its team of autopilot software, according to sources talking to Electrek.
Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk takes the reins. More and more people report directly to him and some senior executives are fired while others are promoted.
In general, Tesla is known for its high turnover, but this has been particularly true in the automaker's autopilot team.
The team has gone through several different leaders in recent years.
In 2016, Sterling Anderson, director of the Autopilot program, set out to create his own startup in the field of automated driving.
Chris Lattner, a respected software developer behind Apple's programming language, was hired to lead the autopilot software team, but it only lasted about 6 months at Tesla.
Last year, Tesla eventually hired Stuart Bowers from Snap as the new vice president of autopilot software.
During this period, many other team members eventually left as Tesla increasingly insisted that driver assistance functions be subject to difficult deadlines, which would lead to a system of driving. totally autonomous.
Over the past year, things seemed to have stabilized with Bowers in charge of the software and Andrej Karpathy as head of the AI and Vision autopilot.
They both made presentations on Tesla's progress in developing an autonomous driving system during the automaker's auto investor's day, but not all went as planned.
In the days leading up to the event, Tesla fired several members of the autopilot teams, according to people close to the case.
A few weeks later, this led to a restructuring of the Autopilot software team.
According to people close to the case and talking to Electrek, Bowers reportedly lost several of his responsibilities and his subordinates were promoted and will now report directly to Musk.
Among those promoted, Milan Kovac, a software engineer who has held a number of positions on the Tesla Autopilot Team over the last 3 years, has been promoted to Tesla's Director of Autopilot Software Engineering. .
Several other autopilot engineers were fired and others were promoted as part of this restructuring. We will update the available information.
We contacted Tesla for a comment on the restructuring and we will update it if we get an answer.
Electrek's Take
The turnover rate in the autonomous driving space is generally high. Space is booming right now and many companies are competing for talent with experience in the field, forcing many engineers to move from one company to the next.
But taking into account the fact that it is extremely difficult to work for Elon Musk and that Tesla is moving in extremely tight deadlines for the autopilot, it seems that the Tesla autopilot program is still suffering from a rollover. more chaotic.
In addition to the three autopilot heads mentioned above, Elon also used Robert Rose and Jinnah Hosein, two renowned SpaceX software engineers, to lead the autopilot program between the mandates of other autopilot leaders.
Several autopilot engineers have also left the team and are now running self-driving programs in other companies, such as Sameer Qureshi at Lyft and Jamie Carlson at Nio.
Tesla is suing Xpeng, an electric vehicle startup that has hired several former members of the Tesla autopilot team, for allegedly stealing the autopilot source code.
The situation is worrying to a certain extent, but not everything is dark. The team still has many talented engineers working on Autopilot and continues to offer more advanced features.
But will they provide a complete autonomous driving ability on the Elon timeline? Unlikely in my opinion, but I would be wrong.
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