Tesla’s Cybertruck chief Siddhant Awasthi departs after eight years

That entire article could just be a tweet.

A headline with no article. 🤣

He got a bonus, I hope.

I would probably leave that off my resume tbh

For what?

Just took an 8 year sabbatical to find myself is all…

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Yeah. Probably scratching those 8 years from his CV. The cyber truck ist one of the best examples of a company absolutely dominating, just having to turn out an expected, non innovative product to roll up the market further, but fumble building a total piece of crap. The cyber truck underperforms in pretty much all metrics it was announced with. It's heavy as fuck, has little range for what I wanted to do and be, no actual exoskeleton, it's just welded and glued on sheet metal to a more classic chassis and frame. 48V and their Ethernet bus is impressive, they've once again just styled on the rest of automotive entirely on their own... But they built an overpriced gimmick car for it.

If you are not in some Optimus related dept. you better leave

https://electrek.co/2025/11/09/tesla-head-cybertruck-program-leaving-company/ More details in this article. Seems like he was just the poor soul who was dumped into the CT chief role late in its development.

From his Linkedin: >I recently made one of the hardest decisions of my life to leave [Tesla](https://www.linkedin.com/company/tesla-motors/) after an incredible run. **Eight years ago, when I started as an intern**, I never dreamed I’d one day have the opportunity to lead the Cybertruck program and bring it to reality. Read that again...he was an intern 8 years ago...and now leaves as the head of the Cybertruck program? He graduated with his bachelor degree in 2015 in Electrical Engineering, bounced around some tech/programming jobs, and got his masters degree in Electrical Engineering in 2017 - then off to TSLA to work on RFID antennas and keyfobs for a while, until being assigned the lead role in the Cybertruck program. My take: NOBODY wanted anything to do with the Cybertruck.

Rats always leave a sinking ship.

I hope he helps GM, Ford, Rivian, Lucid, VW, or any other non Tesla company improve their products.

paltry compare truck makeshift unwritten physical straight grey hurry hobbies *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev/home)*

my take 100%. zero thought was spent on integrating the bed area with the cabin. They just walled it off. Insta-fail.

“Departs in shame…” would be a more accurate headline.

I also suspect that Musk was constantly seagulling him, so he never had a chance to succeed.

He should have quit as soon as he was told his job was to build this monstrosity.

That assignment should have been his clue to get out at the first opportunity. I would be embarssed to have something like this on my resume.

Shouldn't Optimus be able to staff itself?

Why did they ever stay in the first place?

What the big deal. He was just a program manager. And why is all media outlets reporting it as if a very big shot left the org. So much so that one of the news outlets is reporting that Tesla stock dropped 3% on his news. Am I missing anything?

That is a paid article. The hint is “Tesla co-founder”.

Yeah he oversaw the sales estimates that focused the company on building production capacity to handle 250k cars a year when their actual demand was "morbin time 2, this body panel is gonna peel off and slice you" it must have been one hell of a ride getting battlefield promoted from pawn to queen or whatever but he was the dude who ended up being in the right place at the right time to catch someone else's head on a bag after it rolled off the guillotine because elons pet project was a ketamine powered bender.

Get out? Dude scored lifetime money in those 8 yrs plus he's going to land somewhere else just fine. Just because the Cybertruck sucks doesn't mean this guy doesn't have a wealth of experience navigating a challenging product development cycle that is going to pay dividends for both himself and wherever he lands.

Big head from Silicon Valley

Lol like Nucleus in Silicon Valley

This.  There were multiple plane crashes at Boeing and the CEO at the time walked away with $60-80 million in stock after being fired

It’s the kind of thing they should’ve built like 10 for fun and been like, okay enough of that.  These are interesting, but impractical

People changing jobs. Unheard of!

⚠️ The Program Manager for the Model Y, Emmanuel Lamacchi, left Tesla the next day! Very telling!

The form factor definitely added all of the unnecessary to it, probably creating a resource sink. Instead of creating a regular EV truck like Rivian, and doing it the “Tesla” way - which would have had its challenges, such as if they implement steer-by-wire, rear angled wheels, powered rear cover - they could’ve spent less time, money and resources trying to engineer it. Kudos to anyone who was there working hard just to “make it work”, in the same vein as Steve Jobs telling iPod engineers he wants 30,000 songs on a handheld device and telling them to go make it happen.

Valuation shmaluation. This time IS DIFFERENT!

Exactly. What’s the big deal when a TPM is departing

Nice

Performance based. Can't be easy creating something somewhat functional from Elons children drawings. Just like his trashy Zip2 coding

Do you remember what SpaceX was doing when the cybertruck was announced? They had just started fabricating the big SpaceX ship out of stainless steal to deal with thermal issues and it also helped with structural strength for the rocket. He cargo culted the unibody stainless idea from the falcon heavy or whatever or was over to the cybertruck and talked about Al the great properties and things it solved before they had a working engineering prototype instead of a marketing prototype.

program manager is his title. and he was an intern 8 years ago. and we call this a "chief"? autonews is really clickbaiting here.

People leave for many reasons  This definitely smells like a forced "out" because of bad press on quality issues for which this role was responsible.  Tax credits or POS rebates  have been cancelled so it's not a wonder why sales have gone down. People would love EVs but for infrastructure lacking  charging stations to enable long distance driving. Without that benefit,  the current sticker price is not worth it, while the economy is still under threat from inflation, tariffs, new skilled worker visa rules etc.