WU Xinzhou, A Former Director of Qualcomm Autonomous Driving Team, Joined Xpeng Motors as Vice President

Financials, Automotive, Healthcare Author: Linyan Feng Dec 21, 2018 05:51 PM (GMT+8)

As leaders in Internet car manufacturing, both Nio and Xpeng Motors face the imbalances of cultural fit and talents management across the borders. To seek a foothold in the fierce new electric vehicles market in China, it's crucial to address the issues when they both starting mass production delivery.

Dec 21, /EqualOcean/- Wu Xinzhou(吴新宙)has joined Xpeng Motors(小鹏汽车)' Silicon Valley team in early December, in charge of the company's autonomous driving department,reported by TMT Post

Xpeng Motors claimed that the company always emphasizes the importance of autonomous driving and will keep on introducing more experts to elevate technology development capability of the team, when responding to an inquiry form TMT Post.

Wu has changed his current working status into serving as Executive of a startup of his Linkedin profile. Wu has many years industry experience in automotive research, wireless communications, and vehicular networking, according to the profile. Wu had been leading advanced automotive research in Qualcomm since he was promoted as Principal Engineer since 2011.

Even WU share the same title with GU Junli(谷俊丽), but GU needs to report to WU now, a man familiar with the matter told TMT Post.

Xpeng Motors appointed GU as VP of the company’s autonomous driving department in Oct 2017. GU reported directly to HE Xiaopeng(何小鹏), the company's founder. As a former lead technician of Tesla's autopilot machine learning, GU has built its machine learning team and developed Autopilot 2.0, a technology now deployed in multiple generations of Tesla automobiles.

Due to cultural differences between Silicon Valley workforce and that of Chinese startups, Ph.D. GU might have some misunderstandings and conflicts with the company's core-team, a resource man told TMT Post.

It's not the first time for China-based companies struggled with foreign managers. For example, Nio(蔚来) announced the resignment of Padmasree Warrior, the head of Nio's U.S. branches, mainly because Nio had trouble with managing U.S. branches, according to TMT Post.

As leaders in Internet car manufacturing, both Nio and Xpeng Motors face the imbalances of cultural fit and talents management across the borders. To seek a foothold in the fierce new electric vehicles market in China, it's crucial to address the issues when the two companies both starting mass production delivery recently.

——Author: LinYan.Write to LinYan at LinYan@EqualOcean.com