April 20, 2024

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[THE INVESTOR]  Hyundai Motor  will tie up with three major universities to roll out an autonomous car equipped with high-performance sensor next year, according to local news outlet Money Today on Dec. 26. 

The new driverless car will be built on Hyundai’s Ioniq EV platform at the research center in partnership with Seoul National University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Ajou University. 

The car will employ light detection and ranging technology, or LiDAR, a 3-D laser sensor used in Google’s driverless cars that is expensive but key to autonomous cars. LiDAR generates a high-resolution map of the car’s surroundings in real time, faster and more accurate than the radar system, which is cheaper and widely used in the current autonomous cars. 

Hyundai Motor’s autonomous Ioniq concept car

The research team plans to transform the existing Ioniq EV to a driverless car, by adding a steering system and Lidar sensor, by the first half of the next year. 

Earlier, the Seoul National University-led research team successfully converted Kia Motors’ K7 sedan to a driverless car. 

Separately, Hyundai Motor plans to unveil an autonomous version of Ioniq at the CES in Las Vegas in January, offering test-drives of the vehicle to the participants. The latest Ioniq autonomous car uses both radar and LiDAR sensors to support each other.

By Ahn Sung-mi (sahn@heraldcorp.com)