The above table shows key hiring from across industry majors such as BMW (Darren Licardo), Hyundai (Andrew Gray) & Volvo (Stefan Solyom) for managerial & leadership positions. The engineering background of all these key hires includes an education in Robotics, Mechanical & Electrical engineering from places such as Carnegie Mellon, MIT and UC Berkeley. The list of the key people & the backgrounds are at the end of the research note.
Besides, these key hires, there are several internal Tesla groups & personnel that are increasingly supporting Autopilot & Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) activities. For example, long time Tesla engineers Benjamin Thompson & Cam Christie are supporting more ADAS related activities along with their core infotainment focus. In addition, to the Infotainment teams, engineers in the powertrain group such as Justin Sill are also supporting ADAS/Autopilot activities.
Director level employees such as David Lau (Firmware) & Satish Jeyachandran (Hardware Engineering), have been given additional responsibilities around autonomous driving along with prior responsibilities. The autonomous driving push has also percolated to internships where at least four interns from Duke University, University of Minnesota & Georgia Tech have worked on these initiatives.