Tesla Cybercab Assembly Lead Jody Kerns Exits for Rivian R2 Role Weeks After Launch

Tesla’s Senior Manager of Cybercab General Assembly at Gigafactory Texas, Jody Kerns, is leaving the company to become Rivian’s Director of General Assembly for the R2 in Normal, Illinois.

He’s the second Cybercab launch leader to leave Tesla this year. The head of Cybercab new product introduction walked out in April, before the vehicle ever carried a paying passenger.

From Cybercab to R2

Kerns announced the move in a LinkedIn post this week, thanking his Tesla team for everything “from the WEOL project to the launch of the Cyber Cab.”

His profile shows he joined Tesla in January 2024 as an end-of-line manager and took over Cybercab general assembly in Austin in February 2026. That’s the same month Tesla rolled the first steering-wheel-less Cybercab off the line, so he ran final assembly through the entire ramp to commercial service.

At Rivian, he’ll do the same job on the R2. He described the goal as making the R2 “the best electric SUV in the market.”

Kerns isn’t a Silicon Valley hire. He spent 14 years at Volkswagen of America, ending as Director of Assembly from 2021 to 2024, where his profile says he managed about 1,200 people and integrated the ID.4 into a line already building two other models. That’s the Chattanooga plant. Before that, he spent four years in Toyota’s paint shops.

So Rivian is getting someone who has slotted a new EV into a running factory and launched a brand new vehicle from scratch. That’s exactly the R2 problem.

The second Cybercab leader out the door

Kerns’ departure follows Michael So, who was Tesla’s Head of Cybercab NPI from September 2024 to April 2026. So was Giga Texas employee #1 in 2021, helped launch the Model Y and Cybertruck there, and lists the Cybercab’s “unboxed” manufacturing process, brake-by-wire, and butterfly doors among the things he launched.

He left in May to become VP of Product Engineering at Aalo Atomics, a nuclear reactor startup also based in Austin. Under Kerns’ post, So wrote that he “wouldn’t want to launch Cybercab with anyone else.”

The timing isn’t great for Tesla. Commercial Cybercab rides started in Austin on September 3, and NHTSA hit Tesla with a Special Order a week later demanding proof, under oath, that a car with no steering wheel or brake pedal meets federal safety standards. NHTSA now estimates the 2026 Robotaxi fleet, Model Y and Cybercab combined, at about 1,000 vehicles.

Rivian, on the other hand, is in the middle of the ramp that decides its future. R2 deliveries started June 9 from Normal, and Rivian produced 19,751 vehicles in Q3 while keeping its 2026 delivery guidance at 65,000 to 70,000. Rivian has already raised $1.5 billion partly to de-risk that ramp.

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