Xpeng has confirmed that the head of the company's autonomous driving business is leaving, after rumors earlier today caused its Hong Kong-traded stock to plummet.
Xpeng's vice president of autonomous driving, Wu Xinzhou, offered to leave the company last year, and his job will be taken over by Li Liyun, who was formerly in charge of XNGP, the company's chairman and CEO, He Xiaopeng, said in a Weibo post today.
XPeng stock fell 7% in morning trading.
Because of family and multiple reasons, Wu said late last year that he was returning to the US, Mr. He said, adding that Xpeng and Wu have worked together over the past 10 months to define a completely new working model.
Xpeng has done a lot of advance and proactive optimization structurally and organizationally, and also chose Li early on to take over the autonomous driving team, He said.
"In the future, I will still personally lead our autonomous driving and R&D teams," Mr. He said.
Wu joined Xpeng in March 2019 and was a key contributor in helping the EV maker gain a solid smart driving label.
Wu received his undergraduate degree from China's top-ranked Tsinghua University, followed by a master's degree and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Prior to joining Xpeng, he spent more than 10 years at Qualcomm, focusing on autonomous driving solutions.
At Xpeng, Wu led the company's autonomous driving technology path planning and program execution, and built the core team and structure of smart driving.
Under his leadership, Xpeng built highway NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot) functionality based on the Nvidia Xavier chip with only 30 TOPS of computing power.
In 2021, Wu led his team to start reconstructing Xpeng's perception algorithm module, introducing transformer and BEV (Bird's Eye View) perception technology.
On March 31 of this year, Xpeng opened up the first phase capabilities of XNGP -- its new generation of intelligent driving system -- to the G9 and P7i, allowing the two models to support City NGP in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, three cities with high-precision map coverage.
The XNGP assisted driving system is Xpeng's new generation of intelligent driving system and is the ultimate product form of assisted driving before full self-driving is realized, the company previously said.
The full form of the XNGP system will not rely on high-precision maps and will enable an assisted driving experience from the starting parking space to the ending parking space.
The second phase of XNGP, which Xpeng will launch in the second half of 2023, will see full lane change, overtaking and left/right turn functionality extended to major Chinese cities where high-precision maps are not available, while full-scenario ADAS is scheduled to launch in 2024.
The XNGP system will enable full-scene ADAS from start to stop when the full rollout is completed in 2024, the company said.
On June 15, Xpeng's City NGP feature was opened to users participating in a public test in Beijing, making it the first EV maker to do so in China.
