TSLA Tesla Inc

By Rebecca Elliott 

A longtime Tesla Inc. executive who was overseeing the electric-vehicle maker's heavy-trucking efforts left the company last week.

In a brief securities filing on Monday, Tesla thanked Jerome Guillen for his many contributions to the company. No reason was given for his departure, and Mr. Guillen didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla named Mr. Guillen as president of heavy trucking in March. Since September 2018, Mr. Guillen had overseen Tesla's vehicle program, supply chain and service infrastructure, the company said in a March filing.

"As Tesla prepares to enter the critical heavy trucks market for the first time, Mr. Guillen will now leverage his extensive background in this industry to focus on and lead all aspects of the Tesla Semi program, including the related charging and servicing networks," it said in the filing.

The Semi is Tesla's first all-electric semitrailer truck and part of a flurry of vehicle-production activity that Chief Executive Elon Musk has planned for 2021. When Tesla unveiled the Semi in 2017, it promised the truck would be in customer hands in 2019 and selling 100,000 trucks a year starting in 2022. Yet the Semi features around five times more battery cells than Tesla's passenger cars, which Mr. Musk has said constrained his progress on the trucks.

In April, Mr. Musk said the company was continuing development work on the Semi.

Mr. Guillen joined Tesla in 2010 and previously worked on trucks at Daimler AG. He is among the biggest Tesla executives to leave since 2019, when JB Straubel stepped down as Tesla's technology chief.

Write to Rebecca Elliott at rebecca.elliott@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 07, 2021 19:38 ET (23:38 GMT)

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