Chinese EV maker Nio said on Thursday it has restructured its intelligent driving division following the recent departure of several key executives overseeing its artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous driving operations.
Bai Yuli, the company’s head of AI Platform, and Ma Ningning, head of its ‘Nio World Model’ program, have recently left Nio.
Additionally, and as reported earlier this month, Nio’s head of intelligent driving product and experience, Harry Wong, has resigned from the company.
Wong has joined autonomous driving startup Momenta as vice president overseeing its product business.
Founded in 2016, Shanghai-based Momenta develops autonomous driving software and counts SAIC, Toyota, and Mercedes-Benz among its partners.
The startup has recently inked agreements with the three German premium carmakers Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW.
Wong joined Nio in 2022 as senior director reporting directly to founder and Chief Executive Officer William Li.
Nio‘s NWM is a multimodal autoregressive system that integrates visual, linguistic, spatial, and temporal data for real-time reasoning.
The EV maker began rolling out the first version of NWM in June on vehicles built on its new Cedar operating system — starting with its flagship model ET9.
In a statement cited by local media, Nio said the move was part of a “proactive organizational adjustment” intended to strengthen the company’s ability to absorb the latest general artificial intelligence (AGI) technologies and accelerate delivery of its autonomous driving experience.
The Shanghai-based EV maker said it is implementing a so-called “4×100 relay baton” model that integrates pre-research, mass production, platform replication, and vehicle-model replication, aligning its Intelligent Driving and AGI teams under a single structure.
Nio said the new organization is designed to match emerging trends in AGI development and will help advance its next-generation World Model 2.0 system.
The World Model 2.0 platform — a core part of Nio’s self-driving strategy — is expected to roll out in stages across multiple vehicle platforms from the end of this year through the first quarter of 2026.
The new version will introduce an open-set intelligent engine capable of natural-language interaction, allowing users to give open-ended voice commands that the system can interpret and execute accurately, according to the company.
Reinforcement learning will also be used to improve the system’s long-sequence cognition.
Nio’s first-generation World Model, launched on May 30, introduced several industry-first production features.
Among those, the “Emergency Autonomous Pull-Over” for handling driver incapacitation, “Rear Collision Mitigation (RCM)” for crash avoidance, and “General Obstacle Alert and Assistance (GOA),” which detects and responds to obstacles such as poles, guardrails, and curbs during turns, lane changes, or roadside driving.
Separately, the head of Nio’s Southern European region, , Nicola Marsala, also announced his departure from the company.
Marsala joined the EV maker in early 2023 to spearhead its entry into Italy and later served as managing director for the region covering Spain, Portugal and Greece, according to his LinkedIn profile.
