The head of Tesla’s Autopilot, Jim Keller, has left the organization within less than a year of being appointed as the head of the program at Keller is moving to Intel as the senior vice president leading silicon engineering. Intel announced Keller’s appointment a day after his last day at Tesla.
“I had a great experience working at Tesla,” Keller said in a statement released by Intel. “I am excited to join the Intel team to build the future of CPUs, GPUs, accelerators, and other products for the data-centric computing era.”
Keller was working with Tesla since 2016 and started heading the Autopilot division since last June. His predecessor, Chris Lattner, held the position for just six months. Before Lattner, Sterling Anderson was leading the division and left Tesla to co-found Aurora Innovation, a rival self-driving startup.
“Today is Jim Keller’s last day at Tesla, where he has overseen low-voltage hardware, Autopilot software, and infotainment,” Tesla said in its statement late Tuesday. “Prior to joining Tesla, Jim’s core passion was microprocessor engineering, and he’s now joining a company where he’ll be able to once again focus on this exclusively. We appreciate his contributions to Tesla and wish him the best.”
Now two Tesla executives will be responsible for handling various responsibilities in the Autopilot division. Andrej Karpathy, who is the director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, will be in charge of software, and Pete Bannon, who is with Tesla since last two years, will be responsible for the Autopilot Hardware.
Some of the recent executive departures from the company include Jon McNeill, the former global president of sales and service, Eric Branderiz and Susan Repo, whose departure was announced in March.
Due to a recent fatal accident at Tesla, their driver assistance technology is under federal scrutiny. Last month, the driver of Model X died in a car crash on a California Highway while the driver had the system engaged. The car crashed on Highway 101 in Mountain View. Walter Huang’s family claimed that he reported issues with the vehicle’s Autopilot. An investigation by The National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding this matter is in progress.
