Times are tough for Tesla: the firm has just laid off 200 employees working on autonomous driving in the United States and Elon Musk claims that its factories are losing billions of dollars.
Nothing is going right at Tesla! If everything seemed to be going well for Tesla, of which the Model 3 is currently the best-selling electric car in the world and whose implementations of Superchargers are constantly on the rise, the situation is actually not so rosy as that.
Indeed, and as our colleagues from Bloomberg, the firm of Elon Musk would have carried out a wave of layoffs within the Autopilot division. Information revealed by an anonymous source close to the file.
200 people made redundant
Not less than 200 Tesla employees have been let go, all working on the analysis of the Autopilot semi-autonomous driving system. These job cuts were made as part of the closure of the California office located in San Mateo, which had 350 people. According to the specialized site TechCrunchthe remaining employees will relocate to Buffalo, New York, likely over the next few weeks.
Most of the laid-off employees were paid by the hour, a method that Elon Musk nevertheless wishes to develop. Indeed, the boss of Tesla had claimed that 10% of Tesla’s full-time jobs will disappear in the next three months, but that the number of employees paid by the hour (a kind of temporary worker in the United States) would increase. He specified during the Qatar economic forum that the total job cuts would eventually reach 3 to 3.5% of the total number of workersi.e. approximately 30,000 to 35,000 people concerned worldwide.
Factories lose billions of dollars
Although the exact reason for these dismissals has not been detailed, they are in a context of great financial losses for Tesla. Indeed, in a recent interview with a club of brand vehicle owners, Elon Musk pointed out that its factories located in Germany and Texas “were burning a gigantic amount of money”. If the exact figures have not been revealed, but the boss of Tesla speaks of “several billion dollars”.
According to Elon Musk, this difficult situation is in particular the cause of the repeated confinements due to the health crisis, but also of the shortage of semiconductors which results directly from it, leading to delays in production and deliveries. The boss points out that “the last two years have been an absolute nightmare in terms of supply chain disruptions, and we are not yet out of it”. Elon Musk even raises the specter of bankruptcy, indicating that he must find a way to avoid it.
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