Google’s self-driving car unit nabs senior Tesla engineer

SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s autonomous car company, Waymo, has hired Tesla engineer Satish Jeyachandran to lead its hardware team.

Jeyachandran had been the director of hardware engineering at Tesla for seven years. At Waymo, he’ll work with Google's proprietary LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technology, radar, and camera vision — hardware that helps self-driving cars to see the road.

“I wanted to join Waymo because it has a talented, mission-driven team that has made impressive advancements in self-driving hardware. By bringing both hardware and software development under one roof, the team is laser-focused on bringing its technology to more people," Jeyachandran said in a statement on his Linkedin page.

Self-driving cars are considered to be the future of transportation. Top tech companies, major car manufacturers, ride-hailing companies and start-ups are investing in the technology, hoping to grab a piece of what is predicted to be a very lucrative market.

Jeyachandran’s hiring comes is the second high-level exit this week from Tesla’s self-driving car team. Two days ago, the company’s software chief, Chris Lattner, left Tesla’s self-driving car unit after six months on the job. Before that, Lattner worked on self-driving cars for Apple.

“Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all,” Lattner tweeted two days ago.

Waymo, which was created by Google in December, is currently embroiled in an intellectual property lawsuit against competitor Uber. Waymo alleges that former employee Anthony Levandowski stole 14,000 documents relating to its use of LiDAR. In response, Uber has claimed the lawsuit is a tactic to harm the competition and slow down its own self-driving efforts.