Tesla loses Director of Engineering to generator giant looking to compete with Powerwall

Tesla has lost Brian Dow, Director of Engineering, to Generac, the leader in gas generators who is now trying to compete with Tesla’s Po looking to compete with Powerwall.

Dow started at Tesla back in 2016 as a Senior Manager, and he was quickly promoted to Director of Engineering in charge of “Electronics, Firmware, Integration & Test”, a position in held for the last three and a half years.

On LinkedIn, the engineering executive has now confirmed that he left Tesla to join Generac as Vice President of Engineering for “clean energy.” This is an important hire for Generac, whose main business is being threatened by Tesla. The Fortune 1000 American company is best known for producing backup generators for homes and businesses.

While not at the top of the list of businesses Tesla is disrupting, the home backup generator is actually starting to be disrupted by the home battery packs industry, which is being dominated by the Tesla Powerwall. Instead of opting for a noisy, smelly, and polluting gas generator, many homeowners are choosing home battery packs for backup power. On top of that, batteries are more useful than gas generators when combined with rooftop solar power.

The Powerwall is by far the most popular home battery product and it’s growing fast.

Tesla has been deploying Powerwalls at a rate of over 100,000 units per year, and that’s with battery cell supply constraint. Last year, the company disclosed a roughly six-month backlog of orders for the home battery pack and had to limit availability to people who were also ordering rooftop solar power.

In 2020, Generac launched its own offering in the home battery pack market, the PWRcell, to compete with Powerwall.

It’s actually fairly competitive with Tesla in terms of price and energy capacity with a 20 kWh system going for around $20,000.

Now with a former Tesla director of engineering leading the company’s engineering of the new clean energy unit, Generac hopes to accelerate its efforts in the sector.