Tesla Lays Off Lowly Paid Interns Weeks Before Summer Starts

Good morning! It’s Friday, May 3, 2024, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know.

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1st Gear: Interns Are Tesla’s Latest Cost-Cutting Victims

It’s a stressful time for anyone with a job at Tesla right now as boss Elon Musk is cutting teams left, right and center. First, there were redundancies across its California bases, then the marketing team was cut and this week it was the brains behind the Supercharger network. Now, it sounds like the electric vehicle maker may also be cutting its interns, with some finding out their placements have been scrapped just days before they’re due to start. Some students invested thousands of dollars in housing and planning only for their positions to be eliminated without much time to find replacements.

Young people lined up to start summer internships with the EV maker in the coming weeks are having their placements cut, reports Automotive News. The company has rescinded offers of employment to many, with some turning to LinkedIn to search for other opportunities. As Automotive News reports:

“At 8:46am, I opened a Tesla email for flight info. By 11:25am, my internship offer was gone,” wrote Miami University student Joshua Schreiber, who said his start date was three weeks away and that he had already spent “thousands on housing.”

Schreiber, like many other would-be Tesla interns, are getting uncomfortably close to the end of the school year. They say the surprise calls from Tesla informing students that their offers no longer stand have left them without a lot of time to find replacement gigs for the summer.

The internship cuts come as Musk pledged to reduce Tesla’s headcount by as much as ten percent as it sought to lower costs and raise profitability. In its latest financial filings, the EV maker posted a massive drop in profits, its first drop since before the pandemic.

Reportedly, the employees at Tesla who haven’t been caught up in job cuts have stepped in to help the would-be interns find new summer postings, with some singing the praises of the students that had their projects abandoned.

2nd Gear: Stellantis Could Hybridize Some EVs To Meet Demand

It’s a tough time for automakers figuring out how to move away from gas power. Governments around the world are mandating for cleaner power going forward, some people are eagerly adopting electric vehicles, while others are taking some convincing. This has resulted in slowing sales for EVs, right as they should be flying off the lots.

Because of this, automakers are increasingly tempering their pivot to electric power, with General Motors announcing a renewed interest in hybrids, Ford slowing its expansion of EVs and now Stellantis has revealed it could look into ways to add a splash of gas-power back to its EVs, reports Autoblog. As the site explains:

With the EV segment caught in a tug-of-war between market demand and government regulations, carmakers are having to adapt to avoid losing both money and sales. Stellantis is keeping every option on the table, including putting a gasoline engine in its electric models.

Natalie Knight, the chief financial officer for Stellantis, made the announcement while presenting the carmaker’s first-quarter shipment and revenues results. She cited the Jeep Wagoneer S as an example: Unveiled in January 2024, it will go on sale with an electric powertrain, but the brand hasn’t ruled out expanding the lineup with a gasoline-powered model later on, according to Wards Auto. It could be a hybrid, or it might not get any type of electrification. The call will depend on whether there is “a clear demand for that in the market,” the executive said.

However, the move towards hybrid power won’t come to all of Stellantis’ models as new Jeep CEO Antonio Filosa said fitting the Wagoneer S with a hybrid powertrain isn’t an option.

One car that could go from being all EV to hybrid is the Fiat 500e, which will return to America’s shores this year. The car, which is being offered as an EV only at launch, is built on the company’s multi-energy platform, which means that should demand falter Stellantis could look at turning the car into a hybrid as well as an electric model.

3rd Gear: Rivian Handed $800 Million To Expand EV Production

If you can’t stay afloat by cutting huge numbers of staff, what can you do instead? Well, to keep its future EV ambitions alive, startup Rivian has turned to its local authority for a massive loan to get its next-generation plans off the ground.

Rivian, which builds its cars in Illinois, has been handed more than $800 million from the state to fund expansion plans at the site that would enable it to begin production of its next-generation models. As Reuters reports:

Rivian Automotive said on Thursday it has received $827 million in an incentive package from the State of Illinois to expand operations at its Normal facility.

The Irvine, California-based company’s shares rose nearly 10% in afternoon trade after having lost more than 60% of their value this year, as of Wednesday’s close.

The Illinois plant, where Rivian also makes its electric delivery vans for its largest investor, Amazon.com, can produce 150,000 vehicles a year, the company said.

The electric vehicle maker said that the massive injection of funding would help it expand its plant, improve public infrastructure and train staff for its workforce, reports Reuters. The investment will all help it prepare for the construction and rollout of its next model, the R2 that was unveiled in March.

The new R2 and R3 models from Rivian are hoped to help it expand sales of its electric models to over 200,000 units per year thanks to their more budget-friendly pricing.

4th Gear: Ferrari And Aston Martin Still Think The V12 Is King

Electrification is all very nice and all, but it’s not the way the world’s supercar makers want to go. And after pledging to be investigating a move to electric power, Ferrari and Aston Martin have decided they’d rather stick with what they know for now, so have unveiled gleaming new V12 engines for their future models.

When announcing its latest financial results earlier this week, Aston Martin revealed that a new V12-powered model was coming later this year with a highly-refined new V12 motor at its heart. Now, Ferrari has followed suit and threw the covers off two new V12 models. As Reuters explains:

As part of a wider electrification drive in the industry, the firm known for its ‘Prancing Horse’ logo has been adding hybrid-electric cars to its range since 2019 and has promised its first fully-electric vehicle (EV) at the end of 2025.

However, Ferrari has also pledged to continue selling traditional internal combustion engine cars (ICE), also helped by a European Union decision to exempt vehicles that run on e-fuels from its planned phase-out of ICE vehicles.

The new 12Cilindri two-seater and its convertible version, the 12Cilindri Spider, are inspired by Ferrari’s historic grand-tourer (GT) models of the 1950s and 1960s, the company said.

The two new Ferrari cars, which were unveiled in Miami last night, use the same V12 motor that you’ll find in the Purosangue SUV from the Italian outfit. However, for its new V12 models Aston Martin has a new power unit hidden up its sleeve.

According to Automotive News, the new flagship V12 from the British company has redesigned its engine with an updated cylinder block, redesigned cylinder heads and re-positioned spark plugs. These updates plus a raft of other changes to the V12 unit mean it could produce as much as 824 hp.