Tesla loses another director – Rohan Ma, energy/autobidder lead
Another Tesla director is leaving the company, amid an exodus of top talent over the last few months.
The director in question this time is Rohan Ma, who was responsible for Tesla’s “Autobidder” software.
Autobidder is a software platform that coordinates energy trading, which works alongside Tesla’s Energy products, like Powerwalls and Megapacks, to sell energy to the grid in real time.
Software like this is what allows grid-tied batteries to buy and sell from the grid, and help the owners of those batteries to make money by arbitraging energy – storing it when it’s cheap and plentiful, and selling it when it’s expensive and demand is high.
Not only does it help make money for battery owners who provide these grid services, but it helps to balance the grid during unstable times of very high demand or when supply is constrained (due to weather, generation plant shutdowns, or the like). It’s also a solution to the oft-repeated “intermittency” problem of solar and wind.
As of 2023, Autobidder made over $330 million in profits for the owners of the then-7GWh battery capacity that was available under its purview. Our last update on Autobidder profits came about a year ago, so surely more has been made since then.
But that update, at the time, came courtesy of Rohan Ma – the very director who announced his retirement from Tesla this week.
He announced his decision in a LinkedIn Post, where he mentioned his pride in contributing to Tesla Energy, thanked his colleagues, and said he has no plans for the future yet:
After eight years at Tesla, this will be my last week. It was a ride of a lifetime!
Today, Tesla Energy is thriving and I can confidently say it’s in the best position it has ever been in to drive impact toward the original mission I signed up for. I’m proud to have contributed over the years to where it is now, and will be cheering the team on from the sidelines as they carry the torch forward and continue to relentlessly solve problems at the frontier of the energy transition.
I want to thank all of my Tesla colleagues, past and present. It was a privilege to work alongside such incredibly resilient, committed and capable people all these years. I’m also grateful to our Autobidder customers, particularly those who partnered with me when it was just an idea on a white board. I always felt grateful for the responsibility of demonstrating what energy storage is truly capable of achieving in electricity markets, and without the trust of our partners and customers, that would never have been possible. Lastly, Drew Baglino, thank you for betting on me and bringing your vision, intellect and relentless optimism to us all over the years.
As for me, I have no plans yet for my next chapter, which is both thrilling and a bit terrifying. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with many of you in the coming months and learning more about what’s going on out there before hunkering down to build again.
The departure follows a string of other high-profile departures from Tesla.
Notably, Drew Baglino, the one person who Ma mentions by name in his departure post, left in April of this year, alongside Tesla’s announcement that it will lay off “more than 10%” of its global workforce. Baglino had been the top engineer at the company and had worked at Tesla for 18 years.
In the last few months Tesla also lost policy head Rohan Patel, Supercharger lead Rebecca Tinucci (and her entire team), program manager for Model S/3/Y Daniel Ho, investor relations head Martin Viecha, ad team leader Alex Ingram (and his entire team), head of product launches Rich Otto, and more, many of which seem connected in some way to Tesla’s massive layoffs. Around a year ago, the company lost CFO Zach Kirkhorn and senior engineer Colim Campbell as well.
While it’s no surprise for there to be turnover at companies, especially one as large as Tesla, the temporal proximity of departures of longtime and influential employees is worth noting. Tesla’s corporate governance page has become more and more sparse over time, with now only a single C-level executive listed on the site (CFO Vaibhav Taneja – as for CEO Elon Musk, he instead refers to himself as “Technoking”).
Electrek’s Take
We’ve mentioned several times the disturbing direction that Tesla is going with its leadership, with many longtime leaders departing or being fired.
It seems to be a pattern – and we believe that the pattern has to do both with Musk intentionally isolating himself at the top, and making himself seem more necessary to the organization (perhaps related to the shareholder compensation vote), and also related to executive reactions to this leadership behavior.
The company’s direction seems to have changed sharply in recent years, with Musk seeming to lose interest in electric cars and environmental protection and instead doubling down on big, likely unreachable promises for the near future. Not to mention his social media distractions.
For longtime employees who led the charge towards sustainable transport – which is Tesla’s mission, after all – this recent lack of focus on the mission must be discouraging. It’s certainly been discouraging to us here at Electrek, as our mission is also to move to more sustainable transport, and we see the change in Tesla’s strategy, as Fred wrote about yesterday in his excellent article about why he divested from Tesla (TSLA).
Most of these executives haven’t said they’re leaving for this reason, but that’s not the kind of thing that leaders usually say publicly when they leave a job. Everyone wants to put on a nice face and not talk bad on their previous employer, which is understandable. But Rich Otto did say that he left due to low morale in May, and that it was “hard to see the long game” in recent leadership decisions.
While Ma didn’t say anything similar in his departure note, the fact that he thanked only one former executive by name – Drew Baglino, who left earlier this year – and not the chief executive who is still the titular head of the company, may suggest there is some latent dissatisfaction with the direction of the company.
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Tesla has reportedly yet to start testing its robotaxi service in Austin without a safety driver behind the wheel – just weeks before the planned launch.
For months now, Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have been hyping the launch of “Tesla Robotaxi”, a Uber-like ride-hailing service powered by autonomous Tesla vehicles, starting with a launch in Austin, Texas in June.
We have extensively reported that this launch is disappointing compared to what Tesla promised for years: that all its consumer vehicles built since 2016 are capable of self-driving.
Instead, Tesla plans to build an internal fleet of “10-20” Model Ys and have them offer ride-hailing services in a geo-fenced area around Austin, Texas, helped by human teleoperations. This is very similar to what Waymo has been offering in other cities for years, specifically in Austin, for months now.
Even with the significant downgrade in self-driving capabilities promised with this project, there are many doubts about Tesla’s ability to achieve the lesser goal.
That’s because the robotaxi service will be based on Tesla’s ‘Supervised Full Self-Driving’ program, which is currently achieving about 500 miles between critical disengagements fleet-wide, according to the latest crowdsourced data.
Tesla will be able to improve on that by optimizing a version for the geo-fenced area in Austin and it has been training its neural nets for that for months with vehicles going around Austin.
However, a new report now claims that Tesla has yet to start testing its service without safety drivers at the wheel – similar to Tesla’s public ‘Supervised FSD’. The Information wrote in a new report:
Elon Musk’s deadline for launching Tesla’s first robotaxi service, in Austin, Texas, is weeks away, but the company hadn’t started testing its cars without a human safety driver as of last month, according to an engineer close to the testing and a former employee. That’s a crucial step required before Tesla can launch the pilot service for customers.
For comparison, before launching its paid ride service in Austin, Waymo tested its vehicles with safety drivers in the area for 6 months and then without safety drivers for another 6 months.
Waymo has now taken over a significant market share of ride-hailing rides in the Texas capital, but it still has limitations; for example, it doesn’t drive on the interstate.
The report also mentions that Tesla has been working with local emergency services in Austin to develop intervention plans in order to avoid causing issues if its autonomous vehicles fail.
Electrek’s Take
This is the biggest softball goal. It’s a fraction of what was promised, it’s something that others have achieved before. It’s a punt created for Tesla to finally get a “win” in self-driving.
If they can’t even make it, it would be disastrous, but at least, I hope that it will finally open the eyes of many Tesla shareholders to the reality that Tesla is actually behind in autonomous driving and that Musk’s latest claims that Tesla will have “millions of robotaxi on the road” in 2026 are just the same as when he claimed it would happen in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019: corporate puffery.
My main concern now is for public safety. I have little hope of US regulators being able to stop Tesla considering Trump is firing anyone who got in Musk’s way after he gave him over $250 million.
If Tesla brings its cowboy approach to this, it could get bad quickly.
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The development of Rivian’s R2 validation builds continues to progress. We know so because the American automaker’s founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, continues to pepper us with welcome updates with plenty of fantastic images. The latest post features the inner workings of Rivian’s Maximus drive unit, which will propel the upcoming R2 EVs when they hit the market next year.
Another day, another exciting social media update from RJ Scaringe. Nine days ago, the Rivian CEO shared a peek at the company’s new Maximus drive unit, designed to be more compact and efficiently built to help reduce cost-per-unit production.
Our only look was from outside the drive unit’s casing at the time, but it was exciting news nonetheless. As an encore, Scaringe posted photos of the R2 validation builds on a pilot line at the automaker’s facility in Normal, Illinois.
This evening, Scaringe took to Instagram and X once again to share a better look at the inner workings of the Rivian Maximus drive unit. Check it out:
RJ shares more images of Rivian’s Maximus development
Rivian’s CEO posted the three images above, which showcase some interesting perspectives of the developing drive unit. As previously shared by Rivian, Maximus uses a new continuous winding technique that reduces the total welds per stator and thus the total overall cost of building each one.
For comparison, Rivian’s current Enduro drive unit requires 264 stator welds, while Maximus only needs 24. You can see the stator windings in the image above to the left. Scaringe shared excitement in the progress of the Rivian team’s Maximus drive unit as well as some insight in his post:
I love the packaging on Maximus — the drive unit for R2. It has a side mounted inverter that utilizes flat area at the end of the motor to minimize the length of bus bars, keeping them light and efficient. The large planar shape also allows all processing and power electronics to exist on a single printed circuit board.
The inverter chassis closes out the oil cooled motor cavity and seamlessly routes coolant from the power modules to the drive unit’s heat exchanger with no extra parts.
Overall, the inverter part count is reduced by 41% relative to Enduro and structural inverter lid saves more parts and fasteners by also serving as the drive unit mount. I love this design efficiency. (heart emoji)
Looks fantastic, RJ. We can’t wait to see the visual progress of the R2 you share next!
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On today’s thrilling episode of Quick Charge, we’ve a huge spike in global EV sales and a huge dip in Tesla deliveries. Plus a whole bunch of news from Toyota, including an updated bZ that’s just a bit better than before … but is a bit better going to make a big difference?
We’re also on track for more than 1 in 4 new cars sold this year to be electric, with a whole lot more hybrids coming in to make up the difference and drive fuel demand down to a new yearly low. All this, plus the top 5 cheapest EVs to insure when you hit the play button.
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