Earlier this year, Minwoo Park, who previously worked on autonomous driving technology development and commercialization at Nvidia (NVDA) and Tesla (TSLA), was appointed head of Hyundai Motor Group’s autonomous driving division, becoming the youngest division president at the automaker. The appointment aims to strengthen Hyundai’s competitiveness in software-defined vehicles and autonomous driving software, and to accelerate product development.
What Minwoo Park inherited was a division torn apart by internal strife and lagging behind competitors such as Tesla in the race to perfect driverless cars. How bad was Hyundai’s driver assistance software? In 2023, among more than a dozen U.S. automakers ranked by Consumer Reports for such systems, Hyundai came in last. Progress in closing the gap was slow to materialize, ultimately prompting group Executive Chairman Euisun Chung to bring in the 48-year-old executive.
Minwoo Park now faces a daunting task — catching up to rivals such as Tesla and BYD that have already rolled out urban road navigation technology. Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2030 this market could reach $200 billion, and falling behind would threaten Hyundai’s position as the world’s third-largest automaker, because consumers increasingly weigh driver assistance features in their car-buying decisions.
Since taking office in February, Minwoo Park has carried out a sweeping reform: breaking down departmental barriers between the software team and engineers, unifying priorities, and accelerating decision-making. He said that while cultural change takes time, the team now spends more time discussing products rather than fighting internal battles. “Hyundai Motor Group lacks neither technology nor talent. The challenge is coordination.”
Hyundai’s autonomous driving technology has never truly gone beyond basic highway driving, failing to make the leap to complex city streets. But all of that is about to change. In a video released this month showcasing the company’s next-generation system — called Atria AI — Minwoo Park sits in the passenger seat of an Ioniq 6 as the vehicle navigates around parked cars in the rain, completes unprotected left turns, and threads through narrow alleys in Seoul. Minwoo Park personally test-drives the system every week — and like Tesla’s, it relies primarily on cameras to plan routes in real time.
To narrow the gap, Hyundai is fundamentally changing the way it builds autonomous vehicles. Instead of relying on scattered sensors and components from traditional suppliers, the automaker is turning its vehicles into data-collection machines powered by Nvidia’s top-tier AI chips. Under Minwoo Park’s plan, Hyundai will use Nvidia’s system to roll out upgraded driver assistance features by 2028. As millions of new Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis vehicles equipped with the same cameras hit the road, they will continuously transmit real-world driving data back to the company to train Atria AI, paving the way for mass production in 2029 of vehicles capable of navigating city streets.
KJ Hwang, head of Korea automotive and industrials research at Bank of America Global Research, said: “Tesla’s progress in full self-driving highlights the need for Hyundai to accelerate its catch-up efforts. We are still in the early stages, and it is too soon to draw conclusions.” Although Hyundai is behind, Minwoo Park is betting that Hyundai’s sheer scale — its sales last year exceeded those of Tesla and BYD combined — will give it an advantage in rapidly training its system, allowing it to catch up to the current leaders in autonomous driving by the time Atria is deployed in 2029.
