On Tuesday 23 April Tesla will publish data for the first quarter of the year, and it is widely believed that they will be received very poorly by Wall Street. The one relating to financial data, however, will be only the latest of the many problems that the company will have to face, having entered what appears to be the perfect storm. Between the numbers that don’t add up, layoffs, resignations and cancellation of key projects, it can be said without fear of contradiction that Tesla is experiencing one of the most difficult periods of its life.
Manager Drew Baglino leaves, but he is only the latest in a long line of “big shots” gone
The latest news, in chronological order, is the farewell – we don’t know if voluntary or otherwise – of Drew Baglino. The manager, who over the years also held the role of vice president, was head of the Powertrain and Energy Engineering division. In other words, he was the man in charge of Tesla’s motor and battery division. He was also one of the first executives hired by Elon Musk, with whom he shared an 18-year career at Tesla.
Even if Baglino’s farewell is certainly the loudest, it was not the only one during this troubled period. Rohan Patel, vice president in charge of public policies, Anthony Thurston, responsible for the production of battery cathodes and Baglino’s direct subordinate, and Zach Kirkhorn, financial director who left the company last year, also left Tesla.
A real hemorrhage of “white collar” workers, to which is added the dismissal of over 15,000 employees announced by Elon Musk himself a few days ago. Before this, the bomb dropped by Reuters announcing the halt to work on the Model 2, Tesla’s low-cost electric vehicle.
Elon Musk would have decided to go all-in on autonomous driving, but he would have already accumulated a lot of delay
According to a theory relaunched by some press organs, the dismissals and removal of some managers would be a direct consequence of a strategy developed by Elon Musk. Strategy that focuses exclusively on robotaxis and autonomous driving.
The eccentric entrepreneur has in fact shared on X, the ex-Twitter, that on August 8th he will reveal Tesla’s robotaxi to the world. And that would be the only project the company would be working on. Every fund and every effort would be aimed at arriving at August 8th with something in hand.
Tesla will present its self-driving robotaxi in August. But doubts about the Model 2 are growing
To put it in the American way, Elon Musk would have decided to put all his eggs in one basket. And this basket is “called” autonomous driving. A bet in which the company has already invested a lot, with over 500 million dollars earmarked for the creation of a second Dojo cluster in New York.
The Dojo cluster refers to the supercomputer designed by Tesla for the development of artificial intelligence, to be used both for the autonomous driving system of its cars and for the operation of the humanoid robot Optimus. In technical terms, we are talking about a system capable of processing petabytes of data from the cameras of the almost five million Tesla cars in circulation.
However, the Dojo project also seems to have fallen behind schedule: in the plans of Musk and Tesla’s management, the data processing center should have come into operation by the end of August 2024, but it is very likely that the start-up will be delayed. At present it is difficult to imagine that Tesla could present something more concrete than a Proof of Concept in August.
500 million dollars for definitive autonomous driving, Tesla’s bet starts again with a second Dojo
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