By ZHOU Shuqi
A month ago, during an earnings call, BYD’s founder and president WANG Chuanfu sneered at autonomous driving. An “empty headed concept,” he called it, referring to “the emperor’s new clothes.”
But in a recent closed-door session, vice president LI Ke sang an entirely different tune. She told investors that BYD had a team of 5,000 working on smart driving. She said BYD has no worthwhile smart driving technologies and plans to create something new in the next two or three years.
BYD is recruiting autonomous-driving graduates from top Chinese universities. Open data shows the monthly salary of these posts to be as high as 50,000 yuan (US$7,100).
BYD has 60,000 engineers and plans to hire 30,000 more this year. More than 60 percent of the new recruits will hold a master’s degree or a Ph.D.
A total of 20,000 fresh graduates joined BYD last year. This year, the number of fresh engineering graduates alone exceeds that number. BYD had 570,000 employees last year, making it the largest automaker in China. This year, the company is expanding to over 700,000.
Reuters reports that despite Wang’s remarks, BYD founded a self-driving lab in Shanghai last year. BYD is also working with companies like NVIDIA and Horizon Robotics on chips.
BYD’s latest Ocean models have NVIDIA’s DRIVE Orin central computing platform. BYD is also rumored to have worked with drone maker DJI on driver assistance systems.
