Elon Musk’s Tesla laid off hundreds of workers from the Autopilot team as the company closed its California plant. The company’s autopilot feature is facing increasing federal investigation due to the growing list of accidents involving the driver assist feature.
Bloomberg reports that Tesla has laid off about 200 employees from its Autopilot team. The move was reported as a surprise because Tesla had previously reported layoffs targeting paid jobs in the past, rather than reductions in hourly workforce. Also, CEO Elon Musk laid out a plan last week to increase hourly wages.
Elon Musk smiling (TOBIAS SCHWARZ / Getty)
Tesla said on Wednesday that the fatal accident of the Model X last month could only have happened if driver Walter Huang had not paid attention. (KTVU via Associated Press)
Tesla shares fell 3.8 percent after the news. Tesla shares are down 34% this year, compared to the 20% drop in the S&P 500.
Teams at Tesla’s San Mateo office were tasked with reviewing customer vehicle data related to Tesla Autopilot’s driving assistance features and data tagging implementation. Most laid-off employees are data descriptors who work on an hourly basis.
Earlier this month, Musk surprised workers by saying layoffs would be necessary because he had a “bad feeling” about the state of the global economy. In an interview, he explained that about 10 percent of Telsa’s full-time employees will lose their jobs in the next three months, but the total number of people will increase within a year.
The recent layoffs came as a surprise, as Tesla has focused on autopilot features in recent years. Tesla said in a job posting that labeled employee-responsible data is “a critical component for training powerful deep neural networks that help drive autonomous vehicles.” tesla.
Breitbart News recently reported that a federal investigation into Tesla’s autopilot feature is intensifying, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is currently investigating whether the autopilot feature is potentially flawed. Looking at data from 200 Tesla crashes, the agency said, “On average, in these crashes, the autopilot delayed vehicle control less than a second before the first crash.”
NHTSA first launched an investigation into 765,000 Tesla vehicles ten months ago, after 11 collisions between Tesla vehicles and emergency response vehicles. NHTSA is currently expanding its research into the effectiveness of Tesla’s driving assistance system. The agency will now look at 830,000 Tesla vehicles and 200 new accidents involving Tesla vehicles using Autopilot.
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Source: Breitbart
