One of the people told Reuters that Tesla had shut down its office in San Mateo, California and laid off about 200 employees working on its Autopilot driver-assistant system.
The person said most of the laid-off people had been hourly workers.
Early this month, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk told top managers he had a bad feeling about the economy and that the maker of electric cars needed to cut staff by about 10 per cent.
The billionaire said that the 10 per cent cuts would only apply to salaried workers and that hourly staff numbers were still expected to grow.
Raj Rajkumar, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said Tesla is in a major cost-cutting mode. This staff reduction is likely to indicate that 2Q 2022 has been pretty rough for the company due to the shutdown in Shanghai, raw material costs and supply chain problems. Anti-pandemic measures in Shanghai have depressed Tesla's production there.
A laid-off person who spoke to Reuters said that the satellite office had previously been told that they would move to an office in Palo Alto in stages beginning this month after the San Mateo lease expired. Most of the workers were laid off on Tuesday.
He said it was kind of numbing. We're definitely shocked and we're blindsided. Some workers expected Tesla to shift some of the jobs to lower-wage workers in Buffalo, New York to save costs.
Many people in Tesla's San Mateo office work on data annotation - reviewing and labeling various visuals collected from Tesla vehicles to teach the cars' Autopilot system how to handle certain road scenarios.
A number of Tesla data annotation employees said on Tuesday they had been laid off.
It was a disappointing day today. Myself and almost the whole San Mateo Branch at Tesla just got laid off, Caeser Rosas, a data annotation specialist, said on a Linkedin post.
The San Mateo job cuts were first reported by Bloomberg.
Musk said Tesla's new factories in Texas and Berlin are huge money-producing machines that are losing billions of dollars.