Traditional automobile manufacturers have begun to build new energy vehicles in response to the growth in this sector. On March 29, Huang Xin, former director of autonomous driving product of XPeng Automobile, joined NIO (a Chinese automobile manufacturer) as vice president.
During his tenure as the XPeng autonomous driving product director, Huang Xin promoted the implementation of XPeng’s Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP) and Valet Parking Assist (VPA) projects.
Why it matters
NIO has always paid great attention to the recruitment of autonomous driving talents. Li Bin, CEO of NIO, once said that smart electric vehicles are the industry’s future, with intelligent driving being at the heart of this.
NIO is the most similar to Tesla among the emerging Chinese automobile manufacturers. But unlike Tesla, Li Bin does not have a strong personal aura like Elon Musk, which means NIO needs to employ more traditional marketing methods and consider more R&D investment.
Context
In August 2020, Ren Shaoqing, director of R&D at autonomous driving startup Momenta, joined NIO, initially serving as an “assistant vice president”. In December of the same year, NIO restarted the independent development of L4 autonomous driving and promoted its autonomous driving director Zhang Jianyong as assistant vice president, an early employee of NIO who was responsible for the pre-development of autonomous driving at SAIC from 2013 to 2014.
