Baidu opens self-driving car R&D center in Google's backyard, hires Tesla Autopilot engineer

Baidu, China's most popular search engine, like its US-based counterpart Google, is heavily investing in autonomous driving technologies and today it officially announced the launch of a self-driving car R&D center in Silicon Valley, right in Google's backyard. The company expects its team will grow to over 100 researchers and engineers by the end of the year. The company already moved several of its staff from its newly-created Autonomous Driving Unit (ADU) to Sunnyvale and recently hired a Tesla Autopilot software engineer. Liang Heng, a PhD graduate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford,joined Tesla's Autopilot team last year after CEO Eon Musk called for "hardcore software engineers" to join the company's effort to make the next generation of Autopilot fully autonomous. Now he leaves the automaker only 5 months later to join Baidu's autonomous driving team as a'Software Architect'.