McNeill was president of global sales and service at Tesla and an influential figure at the automaker. On Tesla’s earnings call Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said McNeill’s department would report directly to him and that “there are no plans to search for a replacement.”
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Tesla has pledged to eventually create its own ride-hailing service using self-driving vehicles, though there’s been scant signs of progress on this since Musk described the plan in 2016. However, he did revisit the topic on Wednesday’s call. “We expect to operate kind of a shared autonomous fleet, like a combination of Uber or Lyft and Airbnb, where you can opt to have your car enter a shared fleet,” he said. “That’s a pretty significant opportunity.”
McNeill will fill a hole left by the departure late last year of Rex Tibbens, Lyft’s former COO. Tibbens helped Lyft expand throughout the U.S. and steal market share from Uber.