(Reuters) -Tesla will lay off 285 workers in Buffalo, New York, as part of its plans to cut 10% of its global workforce, the electric vehicle maker said in a regulatory notice on Wednesday.
Under pressure from falling sales and a growing price war for electric cars, Tesla announced its latest round of job cuts on Monday in an internal memo seen by Reuters.
The notice was issued Wednesday under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, which requires employers to provide 60 days’ notice before layoffs.
It said the layoffs would take effect on July 15 and that they were due to “economic” reasons. Tesla has a total of 2,032 employees across the two affected locations in Buffalo, meaning the cuts will affect about 14% of employees there.
The factories in New York State were built to produce solar roof tiles. Tesla also makes fast-charging equipment at the site, which has staff labeling data for its Autopilot driver assistance technology and will be home to its Dojo supercomputer project.
The EV maker had laid off 4% of its Autopilot label team employees in Buffalo in February last year as part of a performance review cycle conducted every six months.
The measure came just a day after workers launched a campaign to form a union, but Tesla had said affected staff had already been identified before the union campaign was announced.
Musk last announced a major round of job cuts in 2022 after telling executives he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy. Yet Tesla’s workforce has risen from about 100,000 at the end of 2021 to more than 140,000 at the end of 2023, according to filings with US regulators.
The layoffs follow an exclusive Reuters report on April 5 that Tesla had canceled a long-promised low-cost car, expected to cost $25,000, that investors had counted on to fuel mass-market growth.
Tesla has been slow to revamp its aging models as high interest rates have sapped consumers’ appetite for expensive items, while rivals in China, the world’s largest car market, roll out cheaper models.
(Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
