Baidu opens self-driving car R&D center in Silicon Valley

The firm says it will grow its team to more than 100 researchers and engineers by the end of the year, and has already moved several staff from its new Autonomous Driving Unit (ADU) to Sunnyvale and hired a Tesla Autopilot software engineer. Liang Heng, a PhD graduate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, joined Tesla last year after CEO Elon Musk requested hardcore software engineers join the firm's efforts to make its Autopilot system fully autonomous. He has left Tesla after just 5 months to join Baidu's team as a software architect. Before joining Tesla, Heng worked at Google on Street View. The person in charge of Baidu's ADU, Jing Wang, also just happens to be a former Google employee.