Tesla Inc has closed a California facility and laid off hundreds of employees from its Autopilot team. It was the largest known widespread layoff in the tech industry. The affected employees, who were notified on Tuesday, belong to a team in the San Mateo office that evaluates customer vehicle data related to Autopilot’s assisted driving features and performs so-called data tagging, the people said.
About 200 employees were fired, many of whom were data annotation experts. The office has about 350 employees, some of whom have been moved to a nearby facility.
The layoffs are part of Tesla’s efforts to trim its full-time workforce as the company pulls back from a hiring surge in recent years. Tesla, currently headquartered in Austin, Texas, has grown its global workforce to about 100,000 employees as the company builds new factories in Austin and Berlin.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk surprised employees earlier this month when he said layoffs were necessary for an increasingly unstable economic environment. He later clarified in an interview that about 10% of full-time employees will lose their jobs in the next three months, although the overall headcount could be higher in a year.
Tesla’s layoffs have focused on areas that are growing too fast. Some human resources employees and software engineers have already been fired. In some cases, the layoffs also affected employees who had only been at the company for a few weeks.
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