Ashok Elluswamy has recently been promoted to Tesla’s Vice President of AI Software. Elluswamy has been with Tesla for nearly 11 years, holding the title of Director – Autopilot Software before his promotion this week.
Neither Tesla nor Elluswamy have announced the promotion, but Elluswamy has updated his LinkedIn profile showing his new role as VP is effective this month.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Elluswamy first joined Tesla in January 2014 as a Software Engineer on the Autopilot team, at a time when the company was in the early stages of the Autopilot program. It was during his time as software engineer that Tesla unveiled the first version of Autopilot.
After working as an Autopilot Software Engineer for two and a half years, Elluswamy was promoted to Senior Software Engineer in June 2016. In September 2017, he was promoted again to Senior Staff Software Engineer, and in May 2019, he reached a significant milestone when he was appointed Director of Autopilot Software, a role he held until this week.
As the Director of Autopilot Software, Elluswamy led a team of engineers responsible for Tesla’s self-driving technologies, and has played a pivotal role in developing Full Self-Driving (FSD), especially after the departure of Andrej Karpathy.
One of his major contributions as Autopilot Director came during Tesla’s recent “We, Robot” event, where the company showcased its latest advancements in autonomous technology. In a post on X celebrating the accomplishments of his team, Elluswamy confirmed the event featured 19 Cybercabs and 29 Model Ys, all running software close to what will be released in FSD v13, which successfully drove over 2,000 guests across 1,300 trips during the event without a single incident.
Before his time at Tesla, Elluswamy was an intern at Volkswagen’ as a ‘s Electronic Research Lab.
You can read Elluswamy’s post about the We, Robot event below.
Reflecting on the We, Robot event, we had:
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) October 16, 2024
– 19 Cybercabs and 29 Model Ys driving themselves
– 1,300 trips transporting over 2,000 guests
– Continuous operation of over the 3.5 hours
– And every trip was perfectly safe! pic.twitter.com/TNSOUkulR8
Finally, it took an immense amount of effort from a very talented team to pull this off. The event was super motivating for the team and we are looking forward to bringing this to the real world as soon as possible.
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) October 16, 2024
