Jody Kerns, who ran general assembly for the Cybercab at Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas, is leaving to become Rivian’s Director of General Assembly for the R2 in Normal, Illinois. Kerns is the second Cybercab launch leader to leave Tesla this year, following Michael So in April. The move surfaced on Oct. 15, about six weeks after the steering-wheel-less robotaxi began carrying paying riders in Austin.
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Jody Kerns from Volkswagen to Giga Texas
Kerns joined Tesla in January 2024 as an end-of-line manager and took over Cybercab general assembly in Austin in February 2026, with the job title Senior Manager of Cybercab General Assembly. Before Tesla he spent 14 years at Volkswagen of America, finishing as Director of Assembly from 2021 to 2024, where he managed about 1,200 people and integrated the ID.4 into the Chattanooga plant. Earlier in his career he spent four years in Toyota’s paint shops. The record reads as that of a high-volume assembly specialist, which is the profile Rivian needs while it scales a second vehicle line at its Illinois plant, where Kerns will be responsible for final assembly of the R2.
In a LinkedIn post that Electrek reported, Kerns thanked his Tesla team for everything “from the WEOL project to the launch of the Cyber Cab.” Of the new job, he described the goal as making the R2 “the best electric SUV in the market.” The LinkedIn post is the record of the move itself, and Electrek’s account of it is the basis for the career details here.
Michael So and the first Cybercab departure
So was Tesla’s first Cybercab leader, serving as Head of Cybercab new product introduction from September 2024 to April 2026 and leaving before the vehicle carried a paying passenger. He joined in 2021 as Giga Texas employee number one and helped launch the Model Y and Cybertruck there, and he lists the Cybercab’s unboxed manufacturing process, brake-by-wire and butterfly doors among his launches. In May 2026 he became vice president of product engineering at Aalo Atomics, an Austin nuclear reactor startup.
Under Kerns’s post, So wrote that he “wouldn’t want to launch Cybercab with anyone else.” The first production unit rolled off the line in February, the same month Kerns took over final assembly, so the two men’s tenures overlapped only briefly at the start of the build.
Cybercab production under federal questioning
Tesla announced the first steering-wheel-less Cybercab on Feb. 17, 2026, with continuous production not expected until April. Electrek’s report described a two-passenger vehicle with butterfly doors, a 35 kWh battery, roughly 200 miles of range and a target price under $30,000, launching on the current AI4 computer because the AI5 chip was delayed to mid-2027. Electrek’s coverage of the earlier Austin robotaxi pilot counted about 14 crashes over roughly 800,000 miles, or one every 57,000 miles, against Tesla’s own human-driver benchmark of one per 229,000 miles, and it quoted Elon Musk as saying safe unsupervised driving needs about 10 billion miles of data. Commercial rides in the new vehicle began in Austin on Sept. 3, so Kerns’s assembly line was feeding a service whose software record was already being questioned.
A week later the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued Tesla a Special Order signed by Chief Counsel Peter Simshauser, demanding sworn answers on how a car with no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors meets federal safety standards written for human drivers. The order contained 21 requests, set a Sept. 30 response deadline and warned of civil penalties of up to $139 million for incomplete or untruthful answers. Tesla has no Part 555 exemption, while NHTSA granted Zoox a temporary one in July that caps service at 2,500 vehicles a year through 2028.
NHTSA estimates the 2026 robotaxi fleet, Model Y and Cybercab combined, at about 1,000 vehicles. Against that backdrop, two senior exits among the people who built and launched the car stand out mainly for their timing: So left ahead of the first paid ride, and Kerns left within weeks of it.
Rivian’s R2 ramp is the destination
Rivian began R2 deliveries from Normal on June 9. The company produced 19,751 vehicles in the third quarter and kept its 2026 delivery guidance at 65,000 to 70,000, and it raised $1.5 billion in an offering, part of which was meant to de-risk the R2 ramp, according to Electrek’s reporting on the raise. Kerns will run general assembly for a consumer vehicle in the middle of that ramp.
The comparison has limits. The R2 is built to be sold to consumers, while the Cybercab cannot be sold to them, so the two jobs are not the same kind of launch. What the departures do establish, from Kerns’s own post and So’s, is that the two people who carried the Cybercab from design to production in Texas have both moved on within about six months of each other.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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