Things are, simply, a disaster for Tesla’s Autopilot right now. The Autopilot team at Tesla seems to be not far behind.
By now it is hardly probably news at all that another executive has left Tesla. And you’re probably not even surprised that this executive was working on the Autopilot team. After all, we have been covering countless numbers of executive departures at Tesla over the last couple of weeks, including the company’s main liaison with safety regulators, while at the same time reporting on no less than three NHTSA and NTSB investigations being opened into Tesla vehicle accidents.
What should maybe come as a surprise is that more and more of these Tesla executives are leaving to go to competition in the autonomous driving space. Today’s executive departure is that of Sameer Qureshi, who was a Senior Autopilot engineer, who has reportedly left to go work at Lyft. Electrek, which is usually a Tesla-friendly blog, reported:
Sameer Qureshi is one of those engineers with experience since he has been “responsible for the entire Autopilot software stack across all of Tesla’s cars and platforms” for the past year and a half.
Now Electrek has learned that he left the automaker this month to join Lyft.
Qureshi was a veteran software engineer at Intel when he joined Tesla’s team in 2014 to oversee the software stack of the Model X, a program led by Sterling Anderson at the time, ahead of the vehicle’s launch.
After transitioning projects at Tesla, it appears that Qureshi sees greener pastures at Lyft, working for Luc Vincent, who is the former Google executive that founded the wildly successful “Google Street View” on Google Maps. Electrek continues:
After the launch of the Model X, Anderson became the Autopilot program director, a post that he left in controversy in December 2016 to found his own autonomous driving startup.
At that time, Qureshi became “responsible for the entire Autopilot software stack across all of Tesla’s cars and platforms”, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He held the position throughout the entire rollout of software updates on the new Autopilot 2.0 hardware suite.
We now learn that he left to join Lyft’s Level 5 team as Director of Product this month.
The team was launched last summer as the ride-hailing company’s autonomous driving division at their Level 5 Engineering Center in Palo Alto.
This comes after Tesla’ VP of Autpilot, Jim Keller, also left the company, as we reported in late April.
Even more recently, Tesla lost two additional executives, including their main liason with safety regulators, Matthew Schwall, who left for Waymo. After this, both Arch Padmanabhan, the product director for Tesla’s stationary storage unit, and Bob Rudd, from Solar City, were both reported to be leaving the company – bringing the two month total of executives to no less than 5.
The list of executives who have departed the company over the last few years has been running at a relatively steady clip that usually winds up chalking up a couple of names every month or so – that looks to be accelerating. Bloomberg reported on two additional departures earlier this week:
Tesla Inc.’s energy unit has lost two major executives as CEO Elon Musk promises to reorganize the electric-car maker’s management team, according to people familiar with the matter.
Arch Padmanabhan, the product director for Tesla’s stationary storage unit, and Bob Rudd, a former SolarCity vice president who led North American commercial and utility sales, have both left the company, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly. Tesla didn’t immediately comment on the departures. Padmanabhan said he’s working on a new venture and declined to elaborate. Rudd couldn’t be reached for comment.
Not unlike Doug Field, one of the only four executives listed on the company’s proxy who has apparently taken a leave of absence, Padmanabhan as also mysteriously left to “work on a new venture”. But recently executive departures have been happening at an astonishing rate:
Matthew Schwall, Tesla’s primary contact with U.S. regulators, left to join Waymo, the self-driving-car company started by Google. Jim Keller, head of the driver-assistance system Autopilot, left last month for Intel Corp. Two top financial executives left in March, and sales chief Jon McNeil defected to Lyft Inc. in February. Musk told employees in an email on Monday that he’s “flattening” Tesla’s management structure to improve communication.
But Electrek, not to leave a bad taste in Elon’s mouth, did their best to make excuses for the most recent defector to Lyft by saying “there’s many more examples” of Autonomous driving companies poaching each others’ executives:
There’s a ton of money flowing into the space and recruiters are working double time to secure talent and Tesla’s Autopilot team is a popular target.
It undoubtedly resulted in some poaching, like Xinlai Ni, a former senior Autopilot software engineer and now Chief Architect at Baidu, and Junli Gu, a machine learning expert on the Autopilot team and now Vice President of Autonomous Driving at Xiaopeng Motors, but it’s important to note that Tesla’s Autopilot team has still managed to retain many key engineers.
For example, it goes both ways. Tesla poached data scientist Gabor Szabo from Lyft almost 2 years ago and he has been leading the Autopilot Maps team ever since.
The same thing happened with Baidu. Before Xinlai Ni was poached to join Baidu’s team, Tesla hired their machine learning expert Sanjeev Satheesh to work on Autopilot.
Our conclusions are slightly different.
We’re sure that nothing surprises you anymore when it comes to Tesla, especially given the last couple months that the company has had. However we believe significant attention should be paid to the fact that not only are people leaving, but they are moving to other major players in the autonomous driving space. It is just one more notch higher on the pressure cooker which has been running on full blast for Elon Musk over the last couple months.
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