Google has apparently poached yet another top Tesla employee — going by recent reports that Tesla’s Autopilot program Engineering Manager Robert Rose has left the electric car auto manufacturer to go and work for the tech giant.
Reportedly, Rose will be joining Google’s “Robotics” division — so, presumably, this means that he’ll be working on the company’s electric car/autonomous driving technology. Worth noting here, interestingly, Rose formerly also worked for SpaceX as an engineer during early development of the company’s rocketry technologies — so who knows exactly what he’ll do at Google.
Also worth mentioning are the recent comments that CEO Elon Musk made on Twitter about hiring new Autopilot software engineers, and speeding things up (with regard to the autonomous driving program).
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
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
Presumably, the departure of Rose is connected in some way to these tweets, but who can say for sure (Elon, are you reading this??!!?).
In the end, it seems to be another interesting escalation of the ongoing poaching war… Hopefully 2016 will see things settle down somewhat, with things becoming clearer as far as timelines go — both with regard to Tesla’s autonomous driving technology and with regard to Google’s electric (and autonomous) car ambitions.
(Hat tip to Teslarati for this.)