BYD may be China’s largest EV maker, but it knows it’s lagging behind rivals in autonomous driving, so it’s created a new division and launched a round of hiring to correct that shortfall.
Between 4,000 and 5,000 software engineers were recently hired, BYD senior vice president Stella Li said at an investor forum this month, when asked why the automaker was lagging behind in automation and intelligence technologies.
“We’re not ahead of the others, but we’ll find all sorts of innovations in two or three years,” he said, according to a transcript confirmed by the company.
The automaker’s current recruitment announcements for autonomous driving engineers targeting major Chinese universities such as Zhejiang University indicate that hiring is ongoing.
BYD set up a smart driving research division in Shanghai last year, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
Previously, engineers working on autonomous driving were spread across various parts of the company, and the new division will focus efforts more heavily on high-end automated driving technologies, they said.
The sources were not allowed to speak to the media and declined to be identified. The automaker, which is 9.87% owned by Berkshire Hathaway and had about 660,000 employees in April, declined to elaborate on its self-driving strategy.
BYD sold about 510,000 pure electric and plug-in hybrid cars in China during the first quarter, accounting for nearly 40 percent of those vehicle sales and nearly four times as many as Tesla.
Most of its cars are currently equipped with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) developed by Bosch.
By comparison, rivals such as Tesla, Xpeng, Nio and Li Auto have developed their own automated driving features that are more advanced and could, for example, allow drivers to relinquish control of the car on highways.
BYD also partnered with self-driving chip technology companies Nvidia and Horizon Robotics this year, saying it wants to develop smarter vehicles.
Source: Terra
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