Cash-strapped Chinese electric vehicle startup Nio will lay off 141 employees at its North American headquarters in San Jose, according to a jobs report published this week by the Employment Development Department of California.

The cuts, which will take effect in February next year, follow a previous round of layoffs in April, when Nio sacked 50 employees at its San Jose offices and a further 20 workers at its San Francisco site.

Many of the new layoffs will hit workers in Nio’s self-driving automobiles department, JoAnn Yamani, communications director of Nio North America, said in an interview with the Silicon Valley Business Journal. The cuts are part of a “workforce restructuring effort” related to a recently established partnership with Intel’s self-driving car unit, Mobileye, which will see Nio engineer and produce a Mobileye-designed autonomous driving system, Yamani added.

Tencent-backed Nio was once hailed as China’s answer to the U.S. electric-vehicle giant Tesla, but the company’s fortunes have sputtered in recent months. Nio posted lukewarm sales growth in November, delivering a total of 2,528 vehicles, only two cars more than in October, when sales grew by 25% month-on-month. The company delivered 3,089 vehicles in November last year, soon after it launched its flagship SUV, the ES8.

Contact reporter Ding Yi (yiding@caixin.com)

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