Cross-posting from
another thread because, to me, this is a fascinating and entertaining example of a company’s claims about the autonomy software they’ve developed looking pretty dubious. The employee reviews paint a picture of the biggest “sugar” show at a big “tech” company I’ve ever heard of, with the exceptions of Nikola and Theranos.
What did Xpeng actually develop?
There is little visibility into Xpeng's software. I'm unsure how much of Xpeng's ADAS software they actually own, control, or developed in-house.
Xpeng's ADAS software is called Xpilot. The latest production release of Xpilot is Xpilot 3.0.
Xpilot 3.0 uses a system called
IPU-03 (third-gen Intelligent Processing Unit). IPU-03 is made by a company called Desay SV Automotive. Desay seems like the equivalent of Mobileye and the IPU series seems like the equivalent of Mobileye's EyeQ series.
IPU-03 isn't just chip hardware; in fact, the chip itself comes from Nvidia. As with Mobileye's EyeQ, IPU-03 appears to be an integrated hardware-software package.
This is from Desay's press release:
"Recently, Desay SV Automotive announced the launch of its third generation Intelligent Processing Unit (IPU-03). This re-inforces its commitment to become one of the future leading Level-4 players in the autonomous vehicle domain. With the introduction of the IPU-03, Desay SV Automotive re-affirms and is resolute to achieve this goal in the foreseeable years. Powered by NVIDIA’s Drive AGX Xavier platform, the IPU-03 will enable Xpeng Motors of China to achieve Level 3 autonomous driving capability in the company’s latest and future car model launches.
Amongst the many significant intelligent features that Desay SV Automotive is able to offer are : 1) High-Speed Lane Change Assist (LCA) which assists the driver in making safe lane changing during high speed drive; 2) Safe Distance Assist (SDA) which assists the driver in keeping safe distance from other vehicles while in traffic jam; 3) Active Parking Assist (APA) which assists the driver in making easy parking; and 4) Automated Valet Parking (AVP) which enables the vehicle to perform self-parking (without driver). These are some intelligent features which are expected out of a Level-3 Autonomous Vehicle System. Desay SV Automotive has cleverly integrated multiple signals and information derived from the multitude and array of vehicle sensors (e.g. radars, lidar, camera, ultra-sonic, etc.) and performs complex data processing as well as fusion of derived information. All these in-house development work were performed with a high degree of knowledge in deep & machine learning algorithms coupled with strong artificial intelligence capabilities. The seamless operations of these intelligent functions exhibited by IPU03 is a testimony of those capabilities."
Another
press release:
"Available in China, the Xpeng P7 is one of the world’s leading autonomous EVs and carries the Desay SV automatic driving domain control unit – the IPU-03. Through multi-sensor data collection, the IPU-03 calculates the vehicle’s driving status and provides 360-degreee omnidirectional perception with real time monitoring of the surrounding environment to make safe driving decisions."
On its website, Desay claims to have developed an autonomous driving system that encompasses
perception, localization, path planning, decision-making, and control.
Desay’s IPU-03 runs Blackberry's
QNX OS, a proprietary, closed source real-time operating system.
Nvidia
says of the Xpeng P7:
"Development of the P7 began in Xpeng’s data center, with NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure for training and testing self-driving deep neural networks.
With high-performance data center GPUs and advanced AI learning tools, this scalable infrastructure allows developers to manage massive amounts of data and train autonomous driving DNNs.
Xpeng is also using
NVIDIA DRIVE OS software, in addition to the DRIVE AGX Xavier in-vehicle compute, to run the XPilot 3.0 system. The open and flexible operating system enables the automaker to run its proprietary software while also delivering OTA updates for new driving features."
So, how much of Xpilot 3.0 did Xpeng actually develop, versus buy from suppliers, namely Desay and Nvidia?
How much of the backend infrastructure for Xpilot did Xpeng actually develop vs. purchase?
“This is for the most part not a real company”
I'm reading
Glassdoor reviews for "Xmotors.ai", Xpeng's R&D subsidiary in Mountain View. The reviews are
dismal.
"This is for the most part not a real company. Probably of 75% of the people here are not working on real projects. As others have mentioned, most of the people here spending time appropriating or copying demos from academic research or other companies and then passing it off as their own work. Only a quarter of the people are doing anything actually related to technology that will be deployed or used in production, the rest are a glorified marketing team. Investors have paid enormous sums of money to fund a US marketing campaign who's only goal is to attract more investment through PPTs. Real shareholder value. The admin is also horrendous. Never have I seen such unprofessionalism in the admin they have hired. Benefits promised at hiring are not delivered. Promised stock options never was real."
"A lot of engineering time is spent on preparing unnecessary demos. This can often be a nuisance because it can distract you from your current project and bring down your productivity. This problem is more serious than it seems."
"They talked about the company’s goal of making the world better, solving challenges and being the next Tesla to lure you to accept the offer. Once you come to work, you find people here are busy with producing demos used to show to the headquarter. And as mentioned by others “There are lots of talk,lots of planning,lots of meetings, but no actual action”. Senior managers in China crazy about demos, they have no direction and vision."
"Poor management, poor (or non-existing, i.e fake) stock option policy, poor technology execution."
"Many decisions that are made seem to be strange and beyond understanding of the people. An example is sometimes projects will start in the US office and then without much explanation we are asked to provide all results to the China team and stop working on projects. And then for some reason certain weeks after that, the project will be transferred back with the US team. And then later the entire project is outsourced to a contractor. And then the contract is cancelled."
"* The stock options were too good to be true. They aren't granted, basically a broken promise
* Press releases about Apple IP theft means you won't have any career prospects after working here
* Senior management does not have technical credentials -- resulting mediocre or low quality middle management being hired -- naturally resulting in low quality talent being hired generally.
* No technical questions asked during interviews. Speaks to quality of hiring practices. I was asked something along the lines of "how many binaries have I compiled in the last month"."
"Lots of talk,lots of planning,but no actual action. Company talks like it is the next Tesla but actually have produced nothing of value. They have an electric car but otherwise it is all marketing. Investors and employees were tricked into thinking this is a technology company. It is not. It is a marketing company. No technical questions during interview and all the fancy presentations given to investors and management were copied from unrelated academic presentations."
"you will lose your skills here because there no actual development. stock options are fake. no one wants to hire someone from a company with all the public news about FBI investigation. leaders have no experience."
And it goes on. I'm not cherry picking these examples. Go
see for yourself.