Tesla, at the instigation of CEO Elon Musk, is undergoing a major personnel purge amid falling sales of electric vehicles and the company’s turn towards artificial intelligence.< br/>
Over the past couple of months, Tesla has been in the spotlight of the business media due to a number of bad news, the main one being poor reporting for the first quarter of this year. In January-March, Tesla sold 386,810 electric vehicles worldwide, 8.5% less than in the same period last year. Net profit fell 55% to $1.13 billion. By themselves, these indicators are not so bad, but they overlapped with other official and unofficial alarming reports about Tesla.
On April 5, Reuters news agency, citing insiders, reported that Tesla had closed the project of a budget electric car for 25,000 dollars, which was supposed to enter the market next year, and will instead develop an unmanned taxi. Elon Musk called this Reuters publication a lie, but at the same time immediately scheduled the premiere of an unmanned taxi for August 8.
On April 23, during a conversation with Tesla investors, Elon Max clarified that the company will still have some new, more affordable electric vehicles, but only as derivatives of existing platforms. These new products should reach a production level of 3 million cars per year in the coming years. In 2023, Tesla produced 1.85 million electric vehicles. How Tesla is going to provide such a big breakthrough in the face of a global decline in demand for electric vehicles is not yet very clear.
In mid-April, numerous leaks revealed that Tesla had begun a major wave of layoffs around the world, affecting approximately 10% of its workforce, or about 15,000 people. A recent publication by Electrek magazine, based on anonymous testimonies from Tesla employees, reports that the company is already undergoing a second wave of layoffs, so that as a result, 20% of its employees may lose their jobs. Layoffs are taking place in almost all departments, including the charging station network development department and the service department. The reduction in repair workers caused the greatest surprise among outside observers, since Tesla is literally inundated with complaints due to various defects and software errors in its electric vehicles. However, Tesla has long been using shady methods of dealing with complaints, so, apparently, it can afford to cut its real service department.
At the moment, everything indicates that Elon Musk is consolidating Tesla’s resources in the field of artificial intelligence in general and autopilot in particular, and the development of the line of traditional electric vehicles is being carried out on a residual basis. As part of an April call with investors, Musk, in response to numerous questions about Tesla's budget model, literally said the following: “If you think that Tesla is a car company, then this is fundamentally wrong, and if you ask the wrong questions, you cannot get the right answers.” . If anyone doesn't believe Tesla can solve the autopilot problem, they shouldn't be our investor.»
Elon Musk has long been obsessed with autopilot, but its most advanced version — Tesla FSD (Full Self-Driving) — is still in beta testing mode and cannot be legalized at the current level of legislation and public ethics. Nevertheless, Musk believes that self-driving cars are the future, so instead of a budget electric car for $25,000 there will be a self-driving taxi with unclear commercial prospects.
In addition to the autopilot, Tesla is now intensively, as it seems, developing the Tesla Bot project, also known as Tesla Optimus, a humanoid robot assistant controlled by artificial intelligence. Prototypes of such robots are already working at the Tesla Gigafactory in Texas and performing simple operations; by the end of this year, the systematic replacement of people with Tesla Optimus robots at the company’s factories will begin, and at the end of 2025, Elon Musk intends to launch assistant robots into wide sales. The latter, most likely, will not happen, because, as in the case of autopilot, client operation of robotic assistants will run into safety protocols and insoluble ethical contradictions. Simply put, robot assistants will not be legalized. At best, such robots can be sold to other companies so that they can use them in their factories, but they will not carry bags for pensioners — no one will allow it.