Want to Be a Tesla Test Driver? Here’s More About the Job—Including the Pay

If you’re the sort of person who wouldn’t get inside a driverless car unless they paid you, a job at Tesla could be just the ticket. 

The EV maker currently shows several “Vehicle Operator, Autopilot” jobs on its web site, with openings at eight locations in New York City, Florida, Texas and California. The roles generally demand five to eight hours a day of driving test vehicles, with overtime a possibility in some cases. 

What does it pay? Tesla’s (TSLA) New York City opening, which shows morning, afternoon and night shifts, has two pay bands of “expected compensation,” the first which starts at $25.25 an hour and the second that tops out at $30.60, roughly indicating a range of $52,000 to $64,000 a year, assuming 40-hour weeks. (The jobs are full-time and include healthcare, retirement and other benefits, including an employee stock purchase plan.) 

Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk see autonomy—both in terms of robotaxis and self-driving vehicles—as a key driver of its growth as it seeks to sell more than electric cars. 

“We need the physical product, without which you cannot have autonomy,” Musk said on Tesla’s latest earnings conference call. “But once you have a physical product, the autonomy is what amplifies the value to stratospheric levels.”

Getting there will require testing and approvals in a range of markets, all the while dealing with competitors—including Alphabet-owned (GOOGL) Waymo—that have their own aspirations. 

There’s an increasing sense among investors that the autonomous vehicle marketplace has turned a corner. Bank of America analysts last month said computing breakthroughs, lower sensor costs and a friendlier regulatory environment now point toward a market worth more than $1 trillion when uses like public transportation and freight are factored in.

AVs, the analysts wrote, “are no longer a moonshot.”

Trips to the moon aren’t a requirement of the Tesla jobs. A valid driver’s license, however, is.