Sources familiar with the matter revealed that Wang Naiyan, head of autonomous driving technology at Xiaomi Auto, has submitted his resignation to Xiaomi Auto and is awaiting approval from the company’s management.
As Xiaomi Auto continues to deliver mass-produced models and intelligent driving becomes a core competitive advantage for the brand, a large-scale intelligent driving R&D team of over a thousand people supports Xiaomi’s complete technological layout, from highway NOA (Noise, Assessment, and Assistance) and urban navigation to advanced L3 autonomous driving. Dr. Wang Naiyan, as the head of Xiaomi’s L3 intelligent driving technology, is a key figure in this impressive R&D team, connecting cutting-edge algorithms, mass production implementation, and regulatory safety. From a leading scholar in computer vision to CTO of commercial vehicle autonomous driving, and then to the head of Xiaomi’s advanced intelligent driving efforts for passenger vehicles, his career trajectory perfectly reflects Xiaomi Auto’s complete path to fill the gaps in its top-level autonomous driving capabilities and strive to join the industry’s first tier.
Wang Naiyan possesses a solid academic foundation and is recognized as a top young researcher in the field of computer vision in China. He graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2015. After graduation, he joined TuSimple, an autonomous driving startup, leading the establishment of its Beijing algorithm team. In 2019, he was promoted to CTO of TuSimple China, coordinating both L2 assisted driving and L4 autonomous truck R&D lines. His years of experience in commercial vehicle R&D have given him a comprehensive understanding of the entire algorithm chain, including perception, prediction, planning, and control. He has also accumulated mature experience in large-scale fleet verification, functional safety systems, and extreme scenario testing, making him one of the very few composite technical managers in the industry who is proficient in both L2 mass production deployment, L4 autonomous systems, and regulatory compliance verification.
In May 2024, Xiaomi officially announced Wang Naiyan’s joining the company as the head of Xiaomi’s Intelligent Driving L3 technology, reporting directly to Ye Hangjun, Chairman of Xiaomi’s Technical Committee and head of Autonomous Driving. This talent acquisition is seen by the industry as a landmark event in Xiaomi’s accelerated advancement in intelligent driving. Within Xiaomi’s intelligent driving team of over 1,800 people and its R&D matrix comprised of 108 PhDs, four core leaders have a clear division of labor: Ye Hangjun oversees the overall business architecture, Chen Guang focuses on end-to-end mass production algorithms, Chen Long is responsible for cutting-edge VLA visual language models, and Wang Naiyan independently spearheads the entire L3 process, forming a three-pronged technical layout of “mass production implementation + cutting-edge pre-research + advanced access.”
Having joined Xiaomi for over two years, Wang Naiyan’s work has been running on two parallel tracks: on the one hand, steadily advancing L3 passenger vehicle technology R&D and compliance certification, continuously improving the advanced assisted driving capabilities of existing mass-produced models; on the other hand, leading the verification of autonomous driving technology under extreme conditions, refining the underlying control model through rigorous testing.