Tesla Looking to Hire 800 New Employees After Recent Layoffs, Large Focus on Energy

By Karan Singh
Not a Tesla App

Just three months after Elon Musk fired the entire Supercharger team, and laid off many employees at Tesla, the company is now looking to hire 800 new employees.

This comes after many members of the Supercharger team were hired back after their initial layoffs.

New Hirings

Tesla’s careers page now has more than 800 open positions today, and positions go from anywhere between engineers for artificial intelligence or batteries, ADAS testers in local communities, or service and desk employees for service centers.

Most of the new jobs focus on engineering positions, and many positions in Legal Affairs, Business Support, and vehicle software positions have not been posted or renewed. Those sections remain empty, at least in North America.

Tesla Energy Focus

Interestingly, quite a few of the new positions focus on Telsa Energy and its role in the company. There are several positions for supporting the deployments of Powerwall and Megapack, as well as doing further engineering work on these types of stationary battery systems.

Just recently, Tesla secured a $375 million Megapack contract in Australia – to build one of the biggest 4-hour battery banks in the world. This comes just days after the announcement of a $256 million Megapack contract to expand a different Australian facility.

We’re expecting Tesla to bank more towards its energy business – which has really just started getting off the ground with recent factory expansions and new business. Tesla Powerwall also recently hit some spectacular milestones – 100MW in California delivered to the grid, and 200,000 hours of backup power after Hurricane Beryl in Texas.

Powerwall and Megapack are going to be defining features of Tesla’s business – and we hope to see Tesla Solar – both Solar Panels and Tesla’s Solar Roof, also become more available to the mass market, just like Powerwall is today.

A Look at Tesla's New AI Training Center at Giga Texas [VIDEO]

By Karan Singh
Not a Tesla App

Elon Musk provided a sneak peek into “Cortex”, Tesla’s new AI training center that has been under construction for quite a while at Giga Texas.

Previously, we saw some shots of the new wing for the massive water-cooled supercomputer cluster at Giga Texas, which was being built at the southern end of the Gigafactory.

AI4 Training

Cortex appears to be the name of the supercomputer cluster, and we can assume that it will be referred to that way from now on. Cortex will primarily focus on exploring and expanding FSD’s performance envelope to include AI4, which will begin to diverge from HW3 sometime soon. Tesla hasn’t yet unlocked the full potential of AI4, as it still runs HW3 in emulation mode, but with a few extra tricks that HW3 doesn’t have access to. These are mostly hardware compiler changes, but they make a significant difference in the speed of processing the AI model.

Tesla intends to continue supporting HW3, but it's already apparent that the FSD model for HW3 is smaller than the model for AI4. However, Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s Autopilot program director, expects performance to be similar for the most part.

One other thing that Cortex will likely be tackling is not just FSD in cars – but FSD in Optimus. Optimus uses the same principal technology behind FSD for movement, as well as understanding and learning tasks, so we can expect to see plenty of improvements as Tesla is now getting Cortex online.

Cortex, Not Dojo

What’s most interesting is that this new supercomputer cluster isn’t Tesla’s Dojo Supercomputers. Instead, this Cortex cluster is instead based on Nvidia’s H100 GPUs. Dojo was supposed to be Tesla’s in-house designed and specialized AI GPUs, meant to focus on optimizing FSD.

Dojo isn’t dead – but delayed from the sounds of it. We’re excited to see where Cortex takes Tesla in the future, and when Dojo shows up to join the party.

Tesla Drastically Reduces CCS Adapter and Retrofit Pricing

By Karan Singh
Not a Tesla App

Tesla has lowered the price for both the CCS adapter, as well as CCS retrofits for its entire lineup throughout North America. This includes a reduction in price for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

CCS Adapter

Tesla has dropped the price of the CCS (Combo 1 – North America) from $250 USD to $125 USD ($345 CAD to $175 CAD). That’s a straight 50% price reduction, making Tesla’s OEM CCS Adapter one of the cheapest on the market.

CCS1 was the non-Tesla standard for EVs, prior to Tesla opening the NACS standard. Tesla vehicles that have completed the retrofit, or are built after the retrofit date, can use a CCS adapter to charge at any regular CCS station.

CCS Retrofit

The CCS retrofit enables Tesla vehicles before around September 2022 (depending on model and region) to charge at CCS stations using a compatible CCS-to-NACS adapter. Vehicles built before that date won’t be able to charge at CCS stations without this retrofit. The retrofit also comes with a complementary CCS adapter.

You cannot unbundle the CCS adapter from the retrofit purchase to reduce the price.

The retrofit has different pricing for the Model S/X and the Model 3/Y.

Vehicle

USD (New)

USD (Previous)

CAD (New)

CAD (Previous)

Model S / Model X

$300

$450

$415

$615

Model 3 / Model Y

$225

$350

$310

$475

How to Check If You Need a Retrofit

If you’re not sure whether your vehicle is CCS capable, you can go to Controls > Software > Additional Vehicle Information. It will show a line near the middle titled “CCS Charging and third-party NACS DC charging.” Next to it it will show whether your vehicle supports third-party CCS charging or whether you'll need a retrofit.

NACS to CCS

And that’s not all – Tesla has drastically increased the production of the NACS to CCS adapter for non-NACS vehicles that are Tesla Supercharger approved, hitting a new record of 8,000 units per week.

Tesla has made massive strides in bringing one standard and improving the efficiency and up-time of EV charging throughout North America, and we’re glad to see them continuing this trend as they move forward.

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