The man who led the development of Tesla’s Cybercab from concept to first production unit just walked out the door. Victor Nechita, who held the title of Vehicle Program Manager for the Cybercab, announced on LinkedIn that he’s leaving Tesla after nearly six years to move to Boston. The departure was first flagged on X by @Karanx_ and reposted by Sawyer Merritt.

The timing is hard to ignore. Tesla rolled its first steering-wheel-free, pedal-less Cybercab off the Giga Texas production line on February 17, 2026. Nechita posted his departure announcement on LinkedIn the very next day, just as the company prepares to begin volume production in April.

The Fact: Victor Nechita, the Vehicle Program Manager who oversaw the Cybercab from early development through its first production build, has left Tesla and is relocating to Boston.
The Delta: Nechita is the third vehicle program manager to leave Tesla since November 2025, following the Cybertruck and Model Y program leads who both departed on the same day three months earlier.
The Buyer Impact: Tesla now has zero original program managers remaining for any of its current or upcoming vehicles, raising questions about execution quality during the Cybercab’s critical production ramp.

Nechita’s Tesla career tracks the company’s biggest bet

Victor Nechita joined Tesla in 2017 as an intern on the Model 3 production line, right when the company was fighting through what Elon Musk famously called “production hell.” He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, where he also worked on the university’s aerospace team as a program manager and structures designer.

At Tesla, Nechita climbed from intern to seating engineer to technical program manager for vehicle engineering, eventually landing the top program management role on the Cybercab. His LinkedIn profile listed his title as “Robotaxi Programs @ Tesla” at the time of his departure.

“What a journey it’s been, from interning on the Model 3 production line back in 2017 to becoming the Vehicle Program Manager of Tesla’s first purpose-built AV, the Cybercab,” Nechita wrote in his LinkedIn post. He described the Cybercab development experience as humbling and thanked the team he worked alongside.

He did not name his next employer or explain why he left. He said only that he’s starting a new chapter on the East Coast, specifically in Boston.

Tesla’s vehicle program leadership is now completely hollowed out

Nechita’s exit completes a pattern that started accelerating in late 2025. In November, Tesla lost both its Cybertruck program manager Siddhant Awasthi and Model Y program manager Emmanuel Lamacchia on the same day. Both had started as interns and risen through the ranks, mirroring Nechita’s trajectory almost exactly.

The losses extend well beyond vehicle programs. Tesla’s sales leadership has churned through four executives in 18 months. Chief battery engineer Drew Baglino, supercharging head Rebecca Tinucci, Optimus engineering lead Milan Kovac, and longtime software chief David Lau have all departed since 2024. Head of North American sales Omead Afshar, one of Musk’s closest operational confidants, left in mid-2025.

The result is that Tesla currently has no original program manager remaining for any production vehicle: Model 3, Model Y, Cybertruck, or Cybercab. For a company about to attempt its most technically ambitious production ramp ever, that is a striking gap.

The Cybercab’s timeline makes this departure especially notable

The Cybercab is a two-passenger vehicle with no steering wheel, no pedals, butterfly doors, a 35 kWh battery, and inductive charging. It is designed to operate entirely through Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software and cannot be manually driven. Tesla has priced it under $30,000 and confirmed consumer sales, not just fleet use.

The first production unit came off the Giga Texas line on February 17, ahead of the April volume production target Musk set at the November 2025 shareholder meeting. Musk congratulated the team publicly on X the same day. Cybercab body castings had been spotted at the factory as early as April 2025, with an estimated 75 units visible in staging racks at that point.

But the vehicle faces significant hurdles beyond manufacturing. Tesla’s Austin robotaxi service, which uses Model Y vehicles running the same FSD software the Cybercab will depend on, has logged roughly 14 crashes across 800,000 cumulative miles, according to Electrek’s tracking. That works out to one crash every 57,000 miles, nearly four times worse than Tesla’s own benchmark for human drivers. The company still needs NHTSA exemptions to operate the steering-wheel-free Cybercab on public roads, and the “Cybercab” trademark itself remains in legal limbo as Tesla fights a squatter’s claim at the USPTO.

EVXL’s Take

I’ve tracked Tesla’s executive departures for years now, and a pattern has become unmistakable: the people who actually build the cars keep leaving, while the company doubles down on products that don’t work yet.

Nechita isn’t just another name on the exit list. He was the program manager for the single most important vehicle in Tesla’s pipeline. The Cybercab is Musk’s entire thesis: that autonomy will unlock trillions in value and that Tesla will be the company to do it. And the person who shepherded the hardware side of that bet from development to first production just left.

When the Cybertruck and Model Y program managers left in November, I wrote that Tesla was systematically dismantling the team that built its successful vehicle business. Nechita’s departure extends that trend to the future vehicle business too. Past and future, the builders are gone.

There’s something worth noting about where these people go. Nechita is heading to Boston, home to a growing cluster of autonomous vehicle and robotics companies. Awasthi didn’t announce his next move either. Neither did Lamacchia. When talented engineers leave Tesla without immediately announcing a splashy new gig, it often means they’re going somewhere stealth, or they’re just exhausted.

My prediction: Tesla will promote internally and move forward with the April production ramp regardless. The company has done this before. But the Cybercab isn’t a Model Y refresh. It’s a vehicle that literally cannot function without solved autonomy, built on an entirely new manufacturing process. Losing the program manager who bridged concept and production, right at the handoff to volume manufacturing, is the kind of institutional knowledge loss that shows up six months later in quality issues and timeline slips. Watch Q3 2026 closely.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.