Xpeng , a competitor of Tesla and a popular Chinese electric vehicle producer has recently announced the resignation of its vice president of its autonomous Driving, Xinzhou Wu due to family and perosnal reasons.
Wu, a popular asset and a head of Xpeng’s autonomous Driving,played a vital role in bringing the Xpend to height of success. He is a former senior director of engineering at Qualcomm where he spent a long time. He gained an edge over its EV rivals in the intelligent driving race.
Xpeng is constantly working hard in improving the system and recently as developed the advanced driving assistance system (ADAS) Xpeng navigation guided pilot (XNPG), which is a counterpart of Tesla’s full self-driving system (FSD)
Not only this ,in March Xpeng upgraded its city navigation system for its users in first tier cities including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai. The upgraded system is super powerful that it’s penetration rate exceeded 60%. The company aims to establish a system that reduces the number of manual takeovers per 1,000 kilometres when accessing its highway navigation to one or fewer by the end of 2023.
Wu is considered as the biggestavsset of Xpeng though he has not revealed his next move. In contrast, the rumors roaming around states that he is taking up a senior position in Nvidia’s autonomous driving division. He Xiaopeng, CEO and founder of Xpeng has second the rumors, he expressed pride that Wu is expected to become a top-level manager at a globally renowned company in collaboration on chip technology with Xpeng.
Undoubtedly, Xpeng was in a great partnership with Nvidia, a company which has made big strides into the autonomous vehicle space with its Drive, a smart driving platform and state of the art auto chips.
Luyin Li, a senior director of autonomous driving will take the place of Wu. According to him, this transition has been planned for almost a year and that it will proceed ‘smoothly’
Wu, in his statement said that, “I believe Xpeng’s solid team and system will propel forward the development of ADAS until the era of driverless cars arrives.”
The decision of Wu to leave the organization is indeed a big loss for the company. The decision just came to public just a week after Xpend announced a promising investment from Volkswagen that will soon have the pair co-develop electric vehicle models for the Chinese market.
Wu’s resignation will not have any worst affect on Xpend but it will mark the end of era at the firm. Wu is an AI expert who returned from a Silicon Valley in search of work at emerging Chinese tech companies whole managing R&D teams in the US.
Alas, Wu said in his farewell that, “Five years ago, I crossed the ocean to join Xpeng, landing on the right platform at the right time. I found myself stepping into a race that sent the wind and clouds and set the spirits ablaze.”
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