Race to develop driverless cars piques broad interest in China

New York

GANSHA Wu was a veteran engineering manager at Intel Corp and director of Intel Labs China when two events upended his world last year.

First, he listened to the veteran technology writer Michael Malone tell an audience of Intel employees that if they were too cautious they would fail. Then he attended a leadership training session for Intel executives. The trainer told them that "to be a leader is to design a future that is unpredictable and which nobody bets on." He couldn't sleep at night, thinking about his well-ordered, 16-year career at Intel. So he decided to take a risk. With four colleagues, he made the decision to take the uncertain path, which today is becoming more common in China than even in Silicon Valley: He quit his job to begin a startup that specialises in autonomous, or self-driving, cars.