Tesla's head of autopilot software, Chris Lattner, has left the company after less than six months with the electric carmaker.

"Chris just wasn't the right fit for Tesla, and we've decided to make a change," a Tesla spokeswoman told Reuters.

"Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all," Lattner, who worked at Apple for more than a decade before joining Tesla in January, tweeted.

"I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!"

Tesla's spokeswoman told the news agency it recruited Andrej Karpathy as director of artificial intelligence and Tesla Vision team.

Karpathy, who most recently worked as a research scientist at OpenAI, will report directly to chief executive Elon Musk.

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Karpathy will work closely with Jim Keller, who now has overall responsibility for autopilot hardware and software, the spokeswoman said.

Earlier, a US government report said a man killed in a crash last year while using semi-autonomous driving in his Tesla Model S sedan kept his hands off the wheel for extended periods of time despite repeated automated warnings not to do so.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released 500 pages of findings into the May 2016 death of Joshua Brown, a former Navy SEAL, near Williston, Florida. Brown's Model S collided with a truck while it was engaged in the Autopilot mode and he was killed.