Li says the rumors are nonsense, a ploy spread around by headhunters looking for talent.
(Nio ET5. Image credit: CnEVPost)
Rumors earlier this month that Nio's head of autonomous driving R&D, Ren Shaoqing, would be leaving the company once sparked some concerns. Now, a top executive has officially denied it.
"These are all nonsense. I now officially deny the rumors. These are all tricks spread around by headhunters to poach people, and this matter will not shake our team," local media aicaijing.com.cn quoted William Li, founder, chairman and CEO of Nio, as saying in response on Monday.
Li said he is very busy this year because the R&D workload is very high. "Because I am directly responsible for managing the R&D of our company, there are more than a dozen colleagues who report directly to me," the report quoted him as saying.
"We are doing a lot of work on the underlying technology in-house R&D, including full-stack R&D for autonomous driving," Li said.
Ren, previously head of R&D at Chinese self-driving unicorn Momenta, joined Nio last year, and earlier this month, rumors said Ren was leaving Nio, sparking some concerns about the company's progress in developing self-driving technology.
Then Twitter blogger Marcel Münch (@_mm85), a longtime follower of Nio, quoted Ren's response as saying those were "lies."
🚨 $NIO under attack.
Yesterday, there was a fake rumour on a big Weibo account saying Ren Shaoqing VP Autonomous Driving Algorithm at $NIO leaves the company.
I asked Shaoqing directly and he told me that these reports are “lies”.
Someone spreads misinformation intentionally. pic.twitter.com/UfouIfRkrA
— Marcel Münch (@_mm85) December 3, 2021
In addition to officially denying the rumors, Li also revealed some of the latest developments in Nio's assisted driving research and development.
According to 21jingji.com, since the second half of last year, Nio has further strengthened the depth of its research and development in the field of intelligent driving.
"What people think we should do, we have done," Li said, adding that Nio has shifted its core R&D team to China, according to the report.
Teams related to autonomous driving, including perception hardware and planning and control software, now number almost 1,000, Li said. "Starting with ET7, all autonomous driving technologies except chips are basically developed by us in-house now."
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