The cooperation between Weilai and Mobileye caused the company to “redundant staff in the development of L4 autonomous driving.”
Weilai has laid off staff again, but this time the situation is special.
According to foreign media reports, Weilai Automobile submitted a document to the California Employment Development Department showing that the company ’s North American headquarters in San Jose lay off 141 people, Mainly concentrated in R & D and engineering positions. This is the third layoff in Weilai Automobile this year in the United States.
Weilai’s North American Silicon Valley headquarters was established in 2015. Weilai’s North American headquarters once planned to expand its staff size to more than 1,000 people, but a document from the Securities and Exchange Commission showed that the headquarters had about 640 people at the beginning of this year.
Beginning this year, in order to control costs, Weilai has been reducing the number of employees, and it has not been spared the North American headquarters to undertake the research and development function of autonomous driving technology. Among them, in May, Weilai announced that it would lay off 70 people in North America, and laid off another 62 employees in September. Including the layoffs, Weilai has cut a total of 42% of its employees this year.
The layoffs at its North American headquarters have a lot to do with its previous cooperation with Intel’s autonomous driving team Mobileye. Wei Lai ’s North American Communications Director JoAnn Yamani said that Wei Lai had previously contracted the vehicle engineering and electric drive departments. “There are redundant staff in the development of L4 autonomous driving.”
An insider in the industry has also confirmed that Mobileye uses Wei to make a high-precision map of China REM, The data was collected using Weilai ’s vehicles, and Weilai used Mobileye ’s algorithmic power to disband the North American Silicon Valley team.
For auto companies, the ability to drive autonomously is already the most important selling point of future car sales. Now almost all Auto companies are challenging Level 4 autonomous driving for the consumer market. Car timetable.
Although the layoffs accounted for only a small percentage of Weilai’s global employees, they also sent a signal: Weilai in a hurry, the technical route on autonomous driving may have changed from self-development Cooperation transfer —— By alliance with Mobileye, the two parties will dilute the algorithm and technology input, and improve output efficiency and saveSelf-developed costs of technology.
Mobileye said in the announcement that it will provide Weilai with an L4 self-driving development kit, including cameras, millimeter-wave radar, lidar, GPS and other hardware. According to the plans of both parties, Weilai will launch Level 4 autonomous vehicles in 2022, and Mobileye will also launch consumer-grade autonomous vehicles in the Chinese market in 2022 to provide travel services.
Li Tianshu, assistant vice president of Weilai Automobile and head of the second-generation platform, said in an interview earlier that “the goal is to become the world’s first company to deliver L4 self-driving models.” of.