China’s up-rising EV startup, XPeng, reportedly saw its autonomous driving product director, Huang Xin, leave the company to assume the vice president position of its rival, NIO, a local media outlet reported on March 29th.

Photo credit: NIO

Multiple sources close to the matter disclosed that Huang Xin has already joined NIO, reporting to Li Bin, the founder, president, and CEO of NIO, directly. NIO has yet to respond at press time.

A staff member inside NIO said that the CEO values Huang Xin greatly. As an EV startup that emphasizes autonomous driving technologies, NIO granted Huang Xin a high internal rank. “Li Bin ranks level 6 in NIO, and Huang Xin should be ranking level 5,” the source added.

Furthermore, Huang Xin has once posted a WeChat feed that said “grateful, farewell, blesses” translated from Chinese) in July 2021. At the time, there were talks that the feed represented his resignation from XPeng. If the information is announced true by the companies, Huang Xin will be the latest executive joining NIO’s autonomous driving unit. 

In August 2020, NIO hired the R&D director, Ren Shaoqing, from China’s leading autonomous driving startup, Momenta. Ren was appointed as assistant vice president at NIO initially. Four months later, NIO promoted its own autonomous driving director, Zhang Jianyong, to assistant vice president, after the company restarted its L4 autonomous driving project. Zhang was one of the earlier members of NIO. Before his addition to the startup, he was a member of SAIC Motor's autonomous driving team from 2013 to 2014.