Tesla’s VP of worldwide service leaves the automaker

Tesla had a few important changes in its sales and service leadership over the last year and it looks like changes are still ongoing.

Karim Bousta, Tesla’s ‘Vice-President of Worldwide Service and Customer Experience’, left the automaker this week.

Several sources have told Electrek this week that Bousta is no longer working at Tesla.

We contacted Tesla for a comment on his departure, but a spokesperson declined to comment. We also contact Bousta, but he wasn’t available for a comment.

Back in 2016, we reported on Bousta joining Tesla from Symantec.

The executive was a long-time veteran of service teams at GE and Morpho Detection before becoming the head of service at the cybersecurity company.

After a 2-year stint at Symantec, Bousta was hired to lead Tesla’s service division.

He described his job on LinkedIn:

“Reinventing the Customer experience in Automotive and building Tesla’s large scale worldwide customer and vehicle service operations”

The only more senior service executive was Jon McNeil, President of sales and service, but McNeill left Tesla to join Lyft in February.

At the time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that he would take over his responsibilities and that they wouldn’t look for a replacement.

Yet, Ganesh Srivats, Tesla’ VP of sales in North America, saw his responsibilities expanded following McNeill’s departure from Tesla.

We have also been told that Srivats is currently on leave from Tesla – adding to the changes in the leadership of Tesla’s sales and service department. Robin Ren, Tesla’s head in China, has now taken over responsibilities of Worldwide sales.

Kenny Handkammer, Tesla’s Global Director of Service Innovation, also left Tesla last year after leading a few new programs to make Tesla’s service experience faster.

As for Bousta’s departure, it comes as Tesla is slashing its workforce by as much as 9% in a restructure of the company as Tesla attempts to become profitable by the end of the year.

Despite those cuts, he is leaving as Tesla is launching several initiatives to improve service, including increasing its mobile service fleet and a new education program to train a new generation of electric car technicians.

Bousta was featured in a video about the launch of the latter:

Tesla has lost several executives in recent months, including McNeill, as previously mentioned, but also VP of hardware engineering and Autopilot Jim Keller and senior engineering executive Nick Kalayjian.

But the automaker has also been hiring many new execs.

After announcing a flurry of new executive hires from Apple, Amazon, and more last month, they announced a new head of Energy operations hired from Amazon and a new head of Tesla Europe coming from BMW just last week.