Source: Electric Jen
Robert Rose has parted ways with Tesla Motors, where he once served as Engineering Manager working on the company’s semi-autonomous Autopilot program, to join Google in their Robotics division. It isn’t clear at the moment what Rose will be working on at Google, but it’s a good guess that it has something to do with the company’s autonomous driving initiative. Rose was the former engineer for some of the early rocketry development at SpaceX and is said to have reported directly to Elon Musk according to Engadget.
Elon took to Twitter last week to announce a recruitment drive for software engineers.
Ramping up the Autopilot software team at Tesla to achieve generalized full autonomy. If interested, contact autopilot@teslamotors.com.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2015
That tweet was followed by a series of other tweets stating autonomous driving was a “super high priority” for the company, and that candidates would be personally interviewed by Elon and report directly to him. One can speculate that there’s a correlation between Rose’s departure and Elon’s latest open recruiting drive for software engineers.
Should mention that I will be interviewing people personally and Autopilot reports directly to me. This is a super high priority.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2015
Tesla, Google, Apple and Uber are making investments to become the first in bringing a fully autonomous car to market. Futurist predict as people crowd into cities, owning a private car may become obsolete, especially as the behavioral shift towards subscription type on-demand services – services that supply people with the car they want for the occasion and when they want it – continues to become more commonplace.
Certainly Tesla will find a replacement for Robert Rose, but the battle to poach top talent among tech giants illustrates how intense the competition has gotten in the race to go far beyond what current Autopilot is capable of.
