Tesla has closed its office in San Mateo, California, and about 200 employees working on the Autopilot driver assistance system have been laid off, with most of the laid-off workers classified as hourly workers.
The layoffs at several Tesla plants follow Elon Musk’s decision to cut staff by 10%, with the Tesla chief previously telling top executives he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy.
According to one of the affected workers, employees of the satellite office had previously been told that they would gradually move to an office in Palo Alto earlier this month after the San Mateo lease expired. Contrary to expectations, most of the workers were laid off on Tuesday.
Many employees in Tesla’s Mateo office are working on data annotation. This involves reviewing and labelling various visuals collected from Tesla vehicles to teach the car’s autopilot system how to handle certain road scenarios.
Some Tesla employees also confirmed on LinkedIn that they had been fired.
“So kind of a disappointing day today. Myself along with almost the whole San Mateo Branch at Tesla have just got laid off,” Caeser Rosas, a data annotation specialist, said in a LinkedIn post.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.