SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Chinese electric vehicle maker XPeng Inc said on Wednesday Wu Xinzhou, Vice President of Autonomous Driving, has tendered his resignation from the position for personal and family reasons.
Wu has led the Chinese EV maker’s autonomous driving development efforts since 2018 with more than 1,000 engineers in China and the United States.
Before joining XPeng, Wu worked as Qualcomm’s senior director of engineering in San Diego.
Li Liyun, senior director of XPeng’s autonomous driving team, will take over Wu’s role, the company said in a statement.
“We will remain fully committed to our clear roadmap for the full-stack in-house developed autonomous driving technology and our strategic partnership with the Volkswagen Group,” said He Xiaopeng, Chairman and CEO of XPeng.
“I will continue to personally lead our autonomous driving team and strengthen our leadership in Smart EV technologies,” he added.
Wu, who last year had expressed his intention to go back to the U.S., will join a global company at a high level, XPeng’s chairman said in a post on messaging platform Weibo, adding he is looking forward to continuing to deepen cooperation with Wu in areas including chips. XPeng, which is among China’s top 20 best-selling EV makers, has been upgrading its advanced driver assistance software and has said that it plans to make all of its functions available to drivers across China by 2024, as it seeks to gain an edge over U.S. rival Tesla Last week, the company announced a deal with Volkswagen where XPeng sold a 5% stake to the German automaker.
The two companies also said they would jointly develop EVs based on XPeng’s Edward platform, utilising the latter’s technologies including autonomous driving software.
(Reporting by Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh; editing by Jason Neely and Jane Merriman)
