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Hyundai Motor Group has pursued innovation once again to ramp up its future mobility competitiveness and dominate the market in advance.
Hyundai Motor and its affiliate Kia Motors announced on Feb. 13 that they have consolidated their autonomous-vehicle units into a new entity called the Intelligent Safety Technology Center at its Hyundai-Kia R&D center in Namyang and appointed Lee Jin-woo, who has previously led autonomous driving technology development at General Motors (GM), to lead the research center.
The Intelligent Safety Technology Center composed of 200 researchers is an integrated version of two Hyundai Motor labs that had been separately working on technology related to advanced safety mechanics and autonomous driving, maximizing a synergy by establishing the development systems of related technologies. It will be the one-stop research center that oversees the entire development process of autonomous driving technology, from laying the initial foundation to testing and analyzing the technology as well as implementing it on mass-produced cars. In addition, the new center will not only enhance existing Advanced Drive Assistance System (ADAS) technologies, such as smart cruise control, lane keeping assist system and highway driving assist system, which are currently being mass produced, but also conduct research into artificial intelligence related self-driving car technologies with the aim of commercializing those technologies. In particular, Hyundai Motor Group will also develop a global autonomous driving platform that can be applied to any roads around the world as part of its plan to lead the development of future driverless cars.
Lee is an expert in the self-driving technology sector with a working experience of more than 15 years. He had worked on autonomous driving and robot research projects at Cornell University from 2001 and had been a staff researcher at General Motors’ autonomous driving research lab since 2006.
Hyundai Motor Group has continuously pledged to promote outstanding talents in the R&D sector in order to develop leading car technologies for the future, and it promoted Jang Woong-jun, who has been in charge of developing the company’s ADAS, to director in the annual reshuffle on the 6th.
The reason why Hyundai Motor Group accelerates the development of driverless car technologies is that the related market is growing faster than expected. Market research firm IHS expected in 2014 that the autonomous car market will grow to 12 million units by 2035, but it raised to the estimate to 21 million last year in two years. IHS said that the market would grow to 600,000 units by 2025 and then show a rapid growth with 43 percent a year in the following decade. Accordingly, the competition in driverless driving car development among global automakers has been more intense lately.
Hyundai-Kia Motors’ development in autonomous cars also reminds of the speed battle. The group released an autonomous demo model of the Tucson ix in 2010 for the first time and showed not much movement after that. Then, it tested the self-driving Genesis along actual roads in Seoul in 2015, speeding research in related technologies. The group also earned a license to test its autonomous cars in urban environments in Korea and the U.S., and successfully completed the test drive of the Ionic EV in roads in Las Vegas day and night at the CES last month.
Hyundai Motor Group has been achieving excellent results in autonomous driving development, supported by Vice Chairman Chung Eui-sun. The group is planning to spend about 2 trillion won (US$1.74 billion) on smart car development from 2015 to 2018. Based on it, it aims to succeed in commercializing advanced autonomous driving systems by 2020 and complete the development of driverless cars in 2030.