Just won the "order" of Volkswagen with leading technical strength., will lose a soul of research and development.
On August 2nd, Chairman He Xiaopeng posted on the social platform that Wu Xinzhou, vice president of the Autopilot Center, said in the second half of last year that he would return to the United States due to family and various reasons. In the following 10 months, Xpeng Motors established a brand-new working mode, and optimized and iterated the structure and organization in advance. Dr. Li Liyun, who is in charge of the XNGP project, will take over the autonomous driving team.
He Xiaopeng revealed that Wu Xinzhou will become the highest-ranking Chinese in world-renowned companies.And continue to cooperate with Xpeng Motors in many aspects, such as chips.
It is reported that Wu Xinzhou is about to join the global chip industry giant., or as a global senior vice president, and report to co-founder and CEO Huang Renxun.
This major personnel change triggered a shock in the automobile circle. Wu Xinzhou is the core figure of intelligent driving business in Xpeng Motors. After he joined Xpeng Motors, he led the team to develop intelligent driving software algorithms, and promoted Xpeng Motors to become a leading enterprise in domestic autonomous driving technology.
Or influenced by this news, Xpeng Motors’s Hong Kong stocks fell all the way, once falling to 68.35 yuan/share, a decrease of 17.35%.
Wu Xinzhou graduated from Tsinghua University with a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering, and then received a master’s degree and a doctor’s degree in electronic engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Tucki, he worked inHe has worked for more than ten years as the head of the autonomous driving R&D team.
In March 2019, Wu Xinzhou joined Xpeng Motors, and was fully responsible for the autonomous driving business and team management in Xpeng Motors. It was reported later that before Wu Xinzhou joined Xpeng Motors, the company didn’t develop intelligent driving software smoothly. It was not until Wu Xinzhou joined in, reorganized the technical structure and integrated the team that Tucki’s self-research road was on the right track.
On the P7 model delivered in June 2020, Tucki replaced the supplier’s scheme with a self-developed algorithm, leading the way.More than a year, thanThe bus was nearly two years early. In October last year, Xpeng Motors’s urban NGP function was first carried on Tucki P5 model, becoming the first automobile company in China to mass-produce intelligent assisted driving function in landing cities.
Under the leadership of Wu Xinzhou, in 2021, Xpeng Motors even reinvented the perceptual algorithm module and introduced the 3D perceptual autopilot system (BEV+transformer) based on the vision system to learn comprehensively.The technical path of. A person in the autonomous driving industry told Interface News that Xpeng Motors is the company with the best learning technology.
To a certain extent, some important contributions to the technical label of Xpeng Motors Intelligent Technology come from Wu Xinzhou and his autonomous driving team. The newly listed Tucki G6 can become the lowest-priced vehicle in the current market, which can realize high-order intelligent assisted driving. It relies on Xiaopeng Automobile’s extreme use of the computing power of hardware chips to effectively control the cost.
The intelligent driving system of Tucki P7 and P5 vehicles is based on Xavier platform, and its computing power is only 30TOPS. Ideal, and other China automobile companies to make the same level of functions are based on NVIDIA Orin platform, with a single chip computing power of 254TOPS. Also, two were used and four were used in the car.
In the past July, Xpeng Motors returned to monthly sales of 10,000 vehicles with G6 sales. Within one month after the launch of the new car G6 in Tucki, the number of orders exceeded 40,000, of which the intelligent driving with "Max Edition" accounted for 70%.
An auto-driving industry veteran commented to Interface News that Wu Xinzhou, after joining Xpeng Motors, led Xpeng Motors’s intelligent driving level to the leading level of domestic auto companies, and was an indispensable contributor to Xpeng Motors.
According to a number of people in Xpeng Motors’s autonomous driving business line, Wu Xinzhou’s departure has been relatively clear. Some people in NVIDIA revealed that "(Wu Xinzhou) may be employed in the next month or two at the earliest, which is already a semi-open secret of the industry."
Liu Lan Gechuan, the intellectual driving backbone who represented Xpeng Motors in the world’s top computer vision conference CVPR in 2023, and the head of autonomous driving AI, is also reported to have left his post. According to insiders, Liu Lan Gechuan will be engaged in the next.Business research and development.
According to another report, Xpeng Motors Zhijia team has been in a state of slight turbulence since the beginning of the year, and dozens of middle-level employees have left to join autonomous driving companies such as Dazhuo Technology and Canoe Zhixing. At the same time, Xpeng Motors’s R&D team in North America will also shrink, and its strategic focus will shift to China.
During his four years in Xpeng Motors, Wu Xinzhou set up a stable autonomous driving team with a scale of 1,000 people. Xpeng Motors’s American team consists of about 150 people, who are responsible for core technology research and development. Most of the teams related to landing are in China, and they are located in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
Wu Xinzhou pointed out in a late interview that Xpeng Motors has completed the software platformization on Orin platform, and the same version of software supports all models, basically achieving 75% to 80% software architecture stability. The software architecture stability will be basically completed by the end of next year, and then more iteration and cornercase proficiency will be achieved.
Judging from this point of view, in the short term, Xpeng Motors’s smart driving business will not be greatly affected by the change of personnel. However, with companies such as Ideal, Weilai and Huawei launching an arms race on autonomous driving, the next pressure on Xpeng Motors should not be underestimated.
It has been announced that the city’s advanced intelligent assisted driving function will be rolled out to 100 cities across the country; Weilai Automobile, which focuses on high-speed assisted driving function, is concentrating resources, and plans to put the city’s high-level intelligent assisted driving function to the ground in the second half of the year, and even once lowered the priority of the low-end sub-brand firefly project.
includeTraditional car companies, including, have also set up a team of 3,000 to 4,000 people to develop software and hardware solutions related to assisted driving. In June of this year, Han Bing, the head of intelligent driving business, also said at an event: "BEV is an opportunity to overtake in a corner on high-level intelligent driving."
He Xiaopeng issued a document saying that he will continue to personally lead the autonomous driving and R&D team, and will restructure the intelligent team in Xpeng Motors, integrating autonomous driving, cockpit, machine brain, electronic and electrical architecture and a number of innovative projects into a more powerful intelligent team, and adding intelligent planning and operation teams.
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