architect

After our exclusive report that Tesla hired legendary chip architect Jim Keller from AMD as new “Vice-President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering” earlier this year, we were expecting some new hires to complete Tesla’s growing Autopilot team – especially since CEO Elon Musk said the project was “super high priority” and even encouraged people to apply via Twitter.

Sure enough, Keller’s former colleague at PA Semi and Apple, Peter Bannon, followed him at Tesla just a few weeks later. And now in a significant sourcing move, Electrek has learned that Tesla poached a team of high-profile chip architects and executives from AMD to develop the next generation Autopilot under Keller’s leadership.

Tesla is expected to release more features through over-the-air updates utilizing its current hardware Autopilot suite, but the system, which consists of a forward-looking camera, a radar, and 360 degree sonar sensors, is limited and not expected to achieve fully autonomous driving. Hence why Tesla is currently developing its second generation Autopilot hardware suite, which is should enable fully self-driving cars.
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It’s no secret that Tesla’s retail strategy is inspired by Apple’s. In 2010, the automaker hired George Blankenship as VP of Store Design & Development. Blankenship was a GAP veteran who led Apple’s real estate business from 2000 to 2006 and to whom Apple Store’s early success has been largely attributed. 

Blankenship retired in 2013, but apparently it wasn’t the end of the connection between the retail strategies of the two companies. We learn that earlier this month, Tesla hired the team leader of the architectural team for Apple Stores at Callison, an international architecture firm.
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