Tesla‘s Cybercab manufacturing operations leader Mark Lupkey has left the company, becoming the third senior figure directly involved in bringing the fully autonomous model to production to depart in about five weeks.
Lupkey, who oversaw Cybercab assembly and end-of-line validation at Giga Texas, announced his departure on X on Saturday.
“After nearly 8 collective years across two stints at Tesla, last week was the end of an unforgettable chapter for me,” he wrote in a post. “I am grateful for the leaders who helped shaped me and the people I met and was fortunate enough to lead along the way.”
According to Lupkey’s LinkedIn profile, he had two tenures at the Elon Musk-led company.
The first, from 2016 to 2020, began as a manufacturing manager for seat assembly at Fremont and ended with a sales operations role in St. Louis.
He then spent two years at Ford Motor Company as a maintenance and engineering manager at its Kansas City plant, working on Transit van assembly.
Lupkey returned to Tesla in April 2022, joining Giga Texas.
Over the following four years he held four increasingly senior manufacturing operations roles: Model Y body-in-white, Model Y end-of-line, Cybertruck end-of-line, and finally CyberCab assembly — the role he held from February 2025 until his departure last week.
Pattern of Departures
Lupkey’s exit follows two other senior Cybercab-related departures in quick succession.
In late February, Victor Nechita, who served as Tesla‘s vehicle programme manager for the Cybercab, left the company.
His departure came the day after the first production Cybercab rolled off the line at Giga Texas in mid-February.
Earlier this month, Thomas Dmytryk, a software director who built Tesla‘s over-the-air update system and robotaxi ride-hailing infrastructure, also departed.
The vehicle has no steering wheel and no pedals — it is designed exclusively for fully autonomous operation as a robotaxi.
Tesla executives have said multiple times that the Cybercab vehicles spotted across the US with steering wheels and pedals were only for testing purposes.
Musk has targeted a consumer version priced under $30,000 by 2027.
In early March, the company posted its first Cybercab hardware engineering role in Europe — a Senior Electrical Design Engineer for Robotaxi Autonomous Vehicles, based in Berlin.
The listing calls for work on circuit board design for the autonomous model.
Production Timeline
Tesla produced its first Cybercab at Giga Texas in mid-February.
Production is scheduled to begin in April, though Musk has cautioned that initial output will be “agonisingly slow” as new manufacturing technologies are integrated.
The company launched its robotaxi service using Model Y vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving software in Austin in June 2025.
At the company’s most recent annual general meeting, he said autonomous vehicles would eventually account for the majority of Tesla‘s business.
