Tesla’s senior vice president of engineering Colin Campbell (Colin Campbell) announced his departure, he will join by Tesla co-founder and board member JB Straubel founded Redwood Materials.
Campbell was one of Tesla’s earliest engineers, joining the company in 2006 when it was a small startup planning to launch the Roadster, an electric sports car. As Tesla grew from a startup to one of the world’s largest companies, Campbell rose through the ranks of the powertrain team, becoming director of power electronics engineering in 2016, and then quickly promoted to senior director, responsible for all powertrain development, including electrical, mechanical, and manufacturing engineering for high-power electronics, motors, transmissions, battery packs, and charging systems.
Most recently, he served as Tesla’s vice president of powertrain, but he’s now announcing his departure from the company after 17 years on the job. Campbell announced today on Collab that he will join Redwood as chief technology officer after leaving Tesla.
Campbell will be working alongside his longtime colleague JB Straubel, who was Tesla’s co-founder and longtime CTO before leaving in 2019 to start Redwood, a company that seeks to create a North American battery supply chain by producing and recycling positive and negative electrode materials.
According to Campbell, “I had an incredible 17 years at Tesla, and as an engineer, I can’t begin to summarize the number of valuable technical challenges I encountered in building exciting, safe, reliable and increasingly affordable electric vehicles. My time at the company began when we barely had a viable concept and ended with millions of Teslas on the road around the world. Not only did we have an impact on global emissions, but we changed the way the world views transportation forever and helped shape the product roadmaps of nearly every other automaker. It’s been more rewarding and memorable than I could have ever imagined.”
