Tesla Lays off 200 Autopilot Employees in California

Tesla, the electric car giant, has closed its Autopilot office in the US state of California in San Mateo.

American CNBC news channel reported that Tesla laid off nearly 200 employees in its office, as a part of a broader effort to cut costs at the electric 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, according to Bloomberg.

Previously, the electric car giant, which has yet to deliver on its promise of robotaxi technology, moved a number of its Autopilot data employees to its location in Palo Alto, California.

Tesla 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.

“You knew our lease was ending here in San Mateo,” the manager of the San Mateo office said during a meeting recorded by CNBC.

She told the employees 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 added. “So what that means is we have a restructure in place and your positions were impacted.”

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 restraining the company’s ability to raise production in both facilities.