Tesla closed its San Mateo, California, office also cut about 200 jobs there, news confirmed. As part of a broader effort to cut costs for electric vehicle companies.
At the San Mateo facility, hundreds of workers were task with tag videos of the company’s cars to improve their driver assistance system. Which is sold on autopilot. Bloomberg was the first to announce office closures and layoffs.
Two of the laid-off employees told news on Tuesday that they learned that Tesla’s lease was ending.
The workers tell not to be name as they were not accept to comment on the matter.
Tesla, which has not kept its promise of robotaxi technology. Previously moved several Autopilot data workers to its Palo Alto, California, location. The company also employs and trains a data annotation team in Buffalo, New York. Several employees at the San Mateo bureau have coached the team in Buffalo, officials said.
General data annotation work at Tesla involves identifying and describing objects captured by cameras and sensors on Tesla vehicles in short clips. Annotation data sometimes need to identify overlapping objects. E.g., a wheel hitting a sidewalk or a pedestrian blocking the full view of a stop sign. They are judged by how many videos they can comment on in a short amount of time.
Most ADAS also automated drive system developers outsource some of their data labeling work to companies like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Cloudfactory, Hive AI, and Appen.
A team member told news that most San Mateo employees would be move to Palo Alto or another office but did not lose their jobs.
News also obtained an audio recording of a meeting Tuesday in which an executive notified Tesla Autopilot’s data team about the layoffs.
“They know our lease ends here in San Mateo,” the manager said. He told workers that the company was doing everything. Its power to move the entire San Mateo office-based Autopilot team to the new Palo Alto location.