Tesla loses another manufacturing director as exodus continues

Benjamin Bate, Tesla’s Director of Vehicle Operations and Engineering at Fremont, has left the automaker after over 8 years to become a plant manager at Chemelex.

Bate’s departure, which we spotted on his LinkedIn profile, adds to the now-constant stream of experienced talent leaving Tesla.

He spent just over 8 years at the automaker, working his way up from Maintenance and Controls Manager for paint operations in January 2018 to eventually becoming Director of Vehicle Operations and Engineering at Fremont in August 2023.

Before Tesla, Bate worked at Ford for nearly two years as a Manufacturing Engineering Manager in Paint operations in Kansas City.

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At Tesla, he held several key roles:

• Maintenance and Controls Manager – Paint (Jan 2018 – Aug 2019)
• Senior Manufacturing Manager – Paint Operations (Aug 2019 – Apr 2020)
• Senior Manager – General Assembly Operations (Apr 2020 – Dec 2020)
• Director of Manufacturing – Model 3 and Model Y (Dec 2020 – Aug 2023)
• Director, Vehicle Operations and Engineering (Aug 2023 – Jan 2026)

That last role is significant. As Director of Manufacturing for Model 3 and Model Y, Bate oversaw production of Tesla’s two best-selling vehicles at its most important factory for nearly three years.

He has now joined Chemelex, a Redwood City-based company that specializes in electric thermal and sensing solutions, as Plant Manager. It’s a notable shift from EV manufacturing to industrial equipment.

The departure is another data point in what has become an alarming trend at Tesla.

Over the past two years, the automaker has lost a staggering number of experienced executives and senior managers. Drew Baglino, the 18-year veteran who led powertrain and energy engineering, left in April 2024. The Model Y program manager Emmanuel Lamacchia and Cybertruck program head Siddhant Awasthi both announced their departures on the same day in November 2025. Omead Afshar, one of Musk’s closest lieutenants who oversaw sales and manufacturing in North America and Europe, left in mid-2025.

And those are just the high-profile names. Tesla also lost its long-time head of software David Lau, two of its top car designers, its top crash safety architect, its head of North American sales, and the director behind Tesla Energy products. Countless directors, senior managers, and engineers have quietly updated their LinkedIn profiles over the past year.

At some point, you have to wonder: who’s actually left to build the cars?

Electrek’s Take

What car? Tesla is betting everything on robotaxis and Optimus robots now. Elon Musk has made it clear he doesn’t care much about vehicle sales anymore. But someone still needs to run the factories that generate the cash to fund those AI dreams. People like Benjamin Bate.

Manufacturing expertise takes years to build. It can be hard to replace an 8-year veteran who knows every inch of the Fremont paint shop and general assembly line with a fresh college hire, a strategy Tesla has pursued in recent years.

We previously reported that Tesla is bleeding talent at the top and is not necessarily actively seeking to hire veterans to replace them. It prefers to recruit young people, often straight from college, which is a lot cheaper.

This institutional knowledge walking out the door, it matters. As we’ve reported, Tesla has a serious employee morale problem that doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

I recently spoke with someone who has great insights into Tesla and its engineers, and he brought up an interesting point: regardless of Musk’s toxic brand, one of the main reasons top engineers are leaving is that they are bored.

To retain talent, you need to keep them interested, and since Musk has shifted Tesla entirely toward autonomy and robots, the cars themselves haven’t gotten much attention. Tesla is no longer innovating or pushing the envelope in automobiles. This has to be quite boring.