Baidu has changed the leader of its Intelligent Driving Group, in a move that insiders say indicates that the Chinese internet giant wants to speed up the commercialization of its autonomous driving business.

Wang Yunpeng, vice president of Baidu and general manager of the autonomous driving division, has been promoted to the top spot in the Intelligent Driving Group and will report directly to Chief Executive Officer Robin Li, according to an internal company email.

He replaces Li Zhenyu who has been shifted to the roles of assistant to the CEO and chairman of the company’s technology ethics committee.

The reshuffle means that Beijing-based Baidu wants to start bringing its autonomous driving products and services to the market quicker, Yicai learned from insiders.

Baidu’s self-driving platform Apollo has entered a critical period of mass production and delivery. Nearly 10 car models that are equipped with Apollo’s high-end intelligent driving products are likely to be mass produced this year.

As the scale of operations expands, technology improves and the deployment of self-driving vehicles gets cheaper, the firm’s robotaxi platform Apollo Go will start to break even, CEO Robin Li said at Baidu World Congress in October.

Wang, who joined Baidu in 2012, worked as director of the self-driving tech department before being promoted to vice president in 2021, where he was responsible for the autonomous driving department. He led the team that developed the sixth-generation unmanned vehicle Apollo RT6, that is used in Baidu’s robotaxi fleet.

Apollo Go provided 714,000 rides in the second quarter, a two-and-a-half fold leap from a year earlier, according to Baidu’s second-quarter report. As of the end of June, Apollo Go had provided 3.3 million unmanned rides to the public.