On April 14, another spontaneous combustion accident occurred in a Xiaopeng G3 in Guangzhou, inside a charging pile.
But on the same day, Xiaopeng released its third new model, the Xiaopeng P5, the world’s first LIDAR-equipped mass-produced smart car.
Previously, when Peng announced that it would add LIDAR to its models to be produced from 2021 onwards, it was disliked by Musk, and He Xiaopeng responded strongly, saying that it would beat Tesla to the east in autonomous driving.
As one of the domestic “car-making new forces”, many people are not unfamiliar with him, he has personally created a well-known product UC; at the age of 37 to get more than 10 billion wealth; in the 40-year-old stall, from Ali left, again invested more than 10 billion, in Guangzhou urban village to build a new kingdom –Xiao Peng car.
In this issue of Business 100, let’s learn about the career of He Xiaopeng, an excellent product manager and a young entrepreneur who started a business across the border.
I. “Internet product person” in the jungle
For the choice of life, “science straight man” He Xiaopeng’s body has a rare “rivers and lakes”.
In 1999, South China University of Technology graduated with a degree in computer science, ordinary family background, He Xiaopeng began looking for work. “Life is the moment to jump out of the car,” said Xiaopeng when recalling the day he chose AsiaInfo for his first job search. When he arrived at AsiaInfo, he started working hard to make money, from development, operations and testing, to customer service, pre-sales and post-sales, he did it all. There, He began to lay his own “Internet product people” gene.
Later, not satisfied with a few thousand dollars a month, trying to jump ship HP, but failed. 2004, just before the wave of Internet startups set off. That was a post-PC era, the Internet fire has been a prairie trend. It was also in this year, He Xiaopeng chose a potential, early field, cell phone browser.
Then, he and South China University of Technology alumnus Liang Jie together with the Chinese Internet industry appeared earlier layout of mobile Internet companies – UC YouShi, I think many friends have used its UC browser.
Obviously He Xiaopeng founded UC is prescient, in the mobile Internet outbreak of the eve, the first to occupy a place, especially in the UC browser soon after the launch of the external world is considered a high-quality traffic entrance, which has a 2014 sky-high acquisition, UC to the highest price in the history of the Internet 4.35 billion dollars sold to Alibaba, He Xiaopeng’s ideal of wealth to the speed of lightning to achieve He also became an “Ali person”.
Two, after the freedom of wealth cross-border into the car kingdom
As early as 2013, He Xiaopeng had the idea of doing cars. He is the mobile Internet era to drink the first mouthful of soup, so this also extends his entrepreneurial logic: now is the era of feature phones to smart phones, the future of functional cars will not be transferred to smart cars?
June 13, 2014, Tesla CEO Musk announced that the company used open source model, open all patents to the public, which means that more companies can join the car-making. So He Xiaopeng suggested making cars within Ali, but it didn’t go forward as hoped.
He could not hold himself back any longer. In the same year, he and Li Xueling and dozens of other Internet people, as well as a number of venture capital institutions to invest in the founding of Xiaopeng car.
At first He Xiaopeng joined the new force of car-making as an investor, a node where a man named Xia Heng emerged as one of the key players in the next part of He Xiaopeng’s life.
Xia Heng was originally the head of the control section of GAC’s new energy center, experienced in car manufacturing, and soon after forming a team to get He Xiaopeng’s investment, Xia Heng is now a co-founder of Xiaopeng Auto.
Until another important man GGV Ji Yuan Capital Fu Jixun appeared in 2017, a phone call touched He Xiaopeng and made him change his mind.
In August 2017, He Xiaopeng resigned from his position as president of Ali Dafendian Mobile Business Group and came on board Xiaopeng Auto full time.
That day, He Xiaopeng sent a circle of friends: “entrepreneurship a round, bitter, spicy, sweet and salty, return is still a teenager.”
Three, touch porcelain Tesla, copy or catch up?
In many car companies, Xiaopeng car can be counted as a new force with Tesla has absolute intersection, not only the brand, product positioning is very similar, even the main model Xiaopeng P7 and Tesla Model 3 price almost completely overlap.
We often see He Xiaopeng and Musk dislike each other on social media, mostly because Musk questioned the source code of Tesla’s autopilot software, and He Xiaopeng responded with “to beat Tesla to the east”.
It has to be said that Xiaopeng Auto does have a number of executives who have worked for Tesla.
On January 3, 2019, Tesla’s autopilot system engineer Cao Guangzhi left the company and then joined Xiaopeng Automobile. Junli Gu, who previously served as vice president of self-driving R&D at Xiaopeng Auto, is the former technical leader of Machine Learning at Tesla. We don’t know if this high degree of coincidence in personnel is a normal talent exchange or another hidden agenda.
Putting aside the technology debate, the Xiaopeng car is also criticized for its quality issues.
After experiencing the Xiaopeng car, car blogger Wang Tonggen commented on the autopilot defined by Xiaopeng in this way, “Xiaopeng car’s ability to identify surrounding vehicles can only be described as miserable. I hope autopilot fans can do a little more homework before handing over control of the throttle and brakes and understand how their lives are entrusted to an unreliable feature. “
In addition, at the end of January this year, Xiaopeng G3 due to inverter defects, may lead to models can not start or power loss, recalled 13,399 products, such a recall among the new power is considered the largest one, compared to Xiaopeng G32020 years 11,691 cumulative sales, product quality is really worrying.
The upcoming next 10 years, the competition in the new energy vehicle market will be even more brutal. Can He Xiaopeng achieve his second goal of “doing something different”? Can Xiaopeng become Tesla’s “biggest enemy” or even surpass it in the future? Let’s wait and see!
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