Tesla cuts staff again and prepares humanoid robots

Over the weekend, Tesla fired almost the entire Supercharger team with a few emails.

Tesla licenzia ancora e prepara i suoi robot umanoidi

By: Eleonora Lilli

Published by: Brian Potter

May 8, 2024 at 4:00am ET

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Tesla is undergoing a major reorganisation. The year 2024 began with disappointing profits and the company, which is expanding some existing factories and building others, has decided to reduce its workforce. This decision will also affect the Gigafactory in Berlin, where 300 temporary workers will not be replaced, and in the United States, where hundreds of people working on Superchargers have been made redundant in recent days.

Over the weekend, many Tesla employees posted on Linkedin and other social networking sites that they had received a redundancy notice. Meanwhile, the company released a new video of a prototype of Optimus, its humanoid robot that is already performing factory tasks in its laboratory.

Sudden redundancies

Employees from Tesla's design and engineering teams, product managers and human resources, among others, made it known on social media that they had received redundancy notices by email over the weekend (even on Sunday), without any warning.

The former employees, as reported by our colleagues at InsideEVs US, also shared screenshots of the emails they received from Tesla. They were fired with immediate effect, losing access to Tesla's systems and physical facilities on the same day they received the emails, and many of them didn't know how much their severance package would be.

There was, however, a catch. In April, Tesla announced that it was laying off "more than 10%" of its global workforce. While some senior executives left the company, The Information wrote that the company planned to lay off almost the entire Supercharger team, which was instrumental in creating the gold standard of charging infrastructure in North America.

Robotaxis and artificial intelligence

The additional redundancies follow the company's focus on robotaxis and artificial intelligence. Workers interviewed by InsideEVs US expressed concern about the impact on the quality and reliability of the charging network, a network relied on by millions of Tesla users and soon to be available to owners of other electric vehicle brands.

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Meanwhile, as previously reported, Tesla has released a new video of a prototype of Optimus, the humanoid robot that is already performing factory tasks in its laboratory.

Within a year, according to Elon Musk, this robot should be used to perform real tasks in real Tesla factories and, by the end of 2025, Tesla could start selling it to customers outside the company.

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