Another former Tesla employee joins its rival electric car manufacturing company, Rivian. Its been officially announced that Nick Kalayjian has taken up the position as the role of executive vice president of engineering and product. It’s not the first time that the Tesla employee is joining the company, which is operating in a similar field on developing driverless electric cars. Lucid is a company that was started by Tesla’s ex-employee, which created many controversies in the past years. Kalayjian is one of the important technical people who have spent almost ten years in Tesla’s development. His contribution to the company is well known, recently he quit his position in Tesla and started working for California based company Plenty, which specializes in vertical farming.
There are few restrictions that are imposed on the employees that they can join any other company directly where they need to spend some amount of time in joining their rival company. We are not sure that Tesla has those restrictions. Its expected that there will any those kinds of standards that will be maintained to prevent leakage of information. Rivian took a bit longer before admitting that they have hired Kalayjian. It’s now clear that he will replace Mark Vinnels, who was earlier serving as a VP of Engineering. Rivian is not the only company that is looking forward to hiring Tesla employees. There are several other EV manufacturing companies curiously looking forward to hiring Tesla talents, where it forms a great advantage to have their valuable suggestion from them while designing the EV.
Most of these kinds of hiring doesn’t grab much attention from the industry perspective. Due to the ongoing demand and competition in the automobile industry, hiring the Tesla employee is seen as an important decision. Tesla has been very successful in the recent past years where there produced three EV cars which has the self-driving feature. Tesla is seen as gold in the EV manufacturing business. This hiring information adds fire to the lawsuit that Tesla has already imposed against Rivian. Tesla has also imposed several other allegations against Rivian for stealing their trade secrets through sources. Most of the panel members in Rivian are the chief engineers who worked at Tesla. Peter Rawlinson, CEO at Lucid, has experience as the chief engineer on the Tesla Model S, which makes an added advantage in making important decisions.
Tesla vs Rivian
Based on the previous announcements company’s Air electric sedan is expected to deliver far more than what’s currently available. There are many software companies that are currently working on designing self-driving cars. It’s said that these software developers use Google’s APIs while designing their software packages. Google maps form the primary structure for tracking down the roads for traveling. This feature also gives suggestions to choose a different circuit to avoid traffic which might cause more time on roads. Tesla started designing their products earlier than any other company ever thought of EV cars on roads. Before Tesla, there were many other EV car manufactures who have failed in different stages of their production. Tesla could able to withstand the stress due to the fact that the company has adapted to use the latest technological trend.
Even though the launch of Rivian product R1T and R1S gets delayed due to the global lockdown, we could able to see some of the exciting changes and additions. Pandemic has forced the companies to postpone their release date to 2021. Amazon’s investment in designing an electric delivery van exclusively for Prime delivery drivers forms an added advantage to the company. In the long run, the company has to spend time allocating resources based on the needs to deliver products to the customers.
