AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)07/02 Report--

According to foreign media reports, China's new car-making force Wei Lai Automobile lost two senior executives. Zhuang Li, vice president of software development at NIO, and Angelika Sodian, managing director of NIO UK, have both left. A spokesman for Wei Lai also confirmed the departure of the two men and said that the handover of work had been fully completed.

It is understood that at present NIO internal software open team adjustment, informed sources revealed, Zhuang Li after leaving, located in Beijing and Shanghai software team has been opened, respectively to different responsible persons report work, among which Shanghai software team to NIO enterprise development vice president Zhou Xin report, but also to Li Bin report.

However, a person familiar with the matter said Zhuang Li was "squeezed out of NIO cars because the software developed has been very bad."

After the launch of the first ES8 model in June 2018, due to imperfect software development, a series of fault conditions such as crash and black screen appeared. Some users even started FOTA upgrade by careless continuous misoperation while experiencing the functions of the vehicle during the test drive, resulting in the vehicle stopping directly to complete all upgrade work.

According to a person familiar with NIO's operations, software is one of NIO's weak links and a major source of customer complaints.

However, before, Wei Lai another employee revealed, Zhuang Li in the second half of last year in the outside set up a new company, This in the company has long been an open secret, Li Bin also knew. So far, Zhuang Li has poached many of Wei Lai's technical backbones to her new company. In addition, the above-mentioned employees also said that NIO is brewing a new round of layoffs in the near future.

In July 2016, Zhuang Li joined NIO Automobile as Vice President of NIO Software Development (China), responsible for software development in NIO China.

Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a consulting firm, said software is crucial to the operation of electric vehicles, and Zhuang Li's departure will also greatly affect NIO.

In addition, NIO has been reducing the number of employees in the United States over the past few months. At the end of last year, Padmasree Warrior, chief development officer and North American CEO of NIO Automobile, also decided to leave. Mr Tu added that the financing environment for Chinese electric car companies had become more difficult this year, meaning NIO "needs to cut and chop a lot of clutter".

By the end of May, NIO had delivered 17550 ES8 vehicles, and in mid-June this year, it began delivering the second production vehicle ES6. NIO also announced a recall of 4803 ES8 replacement battery packs due to self-ignition accidents caused by battery pack design defects.

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