Head of Tesla’s Autopilot team announces departure

The head of Tesla’s Autopilot team said Wednesday that he was leaving the company after overseeing development of its ambitious but controversial driver-assist technology.

Andrej Karpathy, who supervised Tesla’s artificial intelligence efforts, including the computer vision behind Autopilot, said he had “no concrete plans for what’s next” after five years at the company. He called it “a difficult decision” without elaborating.

Karpathy wrote on Twitter that during his time at Tesla, “Autopilot graduated from lane keeping to city streets, and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum”.

He had been on extended leave since March. During that time, Tesla cut 200 people from the Autopilot division and closed a facility in California. Chief executive Elon Musk said last month that the company would cut 10 per cent of its salaried workforce, after a rapid increase in staffing over the past two years.

Musk responded to Karpathy’s announcement on Twitter, saying: “Thanks for everything you have done for Tesla! It has been an honor working with you.”

The loss of Autopilot’s top executive comes at a time of increasing scrutiny over Tesla’s self-driving efforts.

Musk has long centred Tesla’s success on the ability of the carmaker to eventually offer buyers fully autonomous capabilities, which he has pledged will be rolled out as a future software upgrade to existing cars.

Musk called autonomous driving “basically a solved problem” in 2016, and in the years since he has consistently projected that Tesla owners would have such capabilities within the following calendar year, although that has not come to pass.

At an FT Live event this year, Musk said: “I could be wrong but I think we are actually quite close to achieving self-driving at a safety level that is better than human . . . we’re really not far from it.”

Although his fully autonomous ambitions have gone unmet, Tesla sells a driver-assist package called “Full Self-Driving” for $12,000, which can functionally drive and change lanes, albeit under the direct oversight of the driver.

Critics believe the “Full Self-Driving” name and other marketing materials are misleading. This year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it was reviewing nearly 200 crashes involving Tesla vehicles to determine whether the systems were at fault.