A couple of days ago, Lei Jun, the CEO of Xiaomi announced a job recruitment advertisement for its first vehicle. The recruitment ad is calling for 500 technical experts to join the “Xiaomi Autonomous Driving Department”.
If you don’t know, autonomous driving technology means self-driving technology for smart cars, which is based on a GPS system. And, in order to self-develop, the tech is leading L4 intelligent driving.
Well, autonomous driving is an extremely complicated scientific research project. It’s such a big plan and Xiaomi is only providing 500 jobs. Isn’t it seems like a drop in the bucket?
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In Xiaolei’s view, among the three new car-making forces of “Wei Xiaoli”, the XPILOT system of XPENG Motors’ self-driving cars is superior in terms of actual intelligence experience and team size.
Are 500 people enough for an autonomous driving team?
Xiaopeng Motors’ current self-driving team has close to 400 people, including about 300 people in the domestic team and about 100 people in the North American team. In fact, the autonomous driving team of Xiaopeng Motors is not only crowded but also has many experts.
Among these 400 people, more than 50 members have doctorate degrees alone, and the proportion of masters and doctors from prestigious universities is as high as 80%. Also, the technical coverage of Xiaopeng Auto’s autonomous driving team is very comprehensive, and there is a clear division of labor between each other.
Its self-driving team department structure includes the main technical subdivisions, including visual perception, positioning, sensor fusion, high-precision maps, planning control, behavior prediction, big data platform, and testing.
Among them, the team of Xiaopeng Motors in North America is mainly responsible for the development of core algorithms, and the team in China is mainly responsible for integration, testing, and implementation.
When we talk about the self-driving team that Xiaomi is about to form, Xiaopeng Motors’ 400-person autonomous driving team is already quite large among the new car-building forces.
However, if Xiaomi can expand the team to 500 at the early stage of its autonomous driving development, at least from the perspective of the team size, it will be at the top of the industry.
Although Xiaomi’s self-driving team is still in the introductory stage, its immense ecological industry chain in the field of self-driving is hard for Xiaopeng Motors to match. According to Xiao Lei, the purpose of the autonomous driving team it established is most likely to integrate the resources of the autonomous driving part of the Xiaomi ecological chain.
