Tesla to locate engineering office in Fort Collins

FORT COLLINS — Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA) plans to locate an engineering facility in Fort Collins that will employ engineers in the company’s autopilot artificial intelligence division.

Details of the operation were not immediately available, but it appears that the company has leased 8,800 square feet of space on the former Hewlett-Packard campus in a building owned by McWhinney Real Estate Services Inc.

McWhinney confirmed that it has leased space in the building at 3420 E. Harmony Road, which is owned by McWhinney entity MO HP5 Harmony LLC, but company officials said that they were under a nondisclosure agreement and could say only that it was a U.S. based electric vehicle company.

Commercial real estate listing website LoopNet shows Tesla as among the tenants in that building. 

SeonAh Kendall, Fort Collins economic health director, said the city had been informed that Tesla will locate there but she did not have additional details about the number of jobs. “Of course, we’re excited about the company,” she said.

Internet searches show that Tesla is hiring multiple engineers for employment in Fort Collins. Among the job listings are design for testability engineers, autopilot AI; senior DFT verification engineers Dojo; and staff physical design engineers Dojo. Wage levels were listed at $88,000 to $306,000 per year. Jobs site Zippia listed 23 jobs in Fort Collins. 

DFT is a reference to “design for testability” and Dojo is the name of Tesla’s supercomputer launched in 2023 to process video data from Tesla vehicles in order to train machine learning models to improve full self-driving technology.

Tesla, under the direction of co-founder Elon Musk, has promised full self-driving modules for its cars since 2016 but has been unable to deliver. In recent days, it has started to refer to the technology as “supervised full self-driving” in that it requires the attention of someone in the car to monitor its usage, according to a report in Electrek, a news website dedicated to coverage of the e-vehicle industry.

The dream of self-driving vehicles lives on at Tesla, which has attempted without success to sell its technology to other automakers.

Tesla has multiple points of presence in the region, including a repair and sales location in Loveland, a crash repair site in Frederick and a sales showroom in Superior. The Loveland location was originally said to be a repair location but it has since added an inventory of vehicles for sale.

BizWest reported in 2021 that Tesla had purchased Louisville battery startup SiILion Inc.

Tesla did not respond to a request for an interview. Its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed that it produced 433,371 vehicles in the first quarter of 2024 with Q1 financial results to be released April 23. The company employs more than 100,000 people worldwide.