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Hyundai develops autonomous vehicles
Korea’s Hyundai Corporation will allocate $5 billion for the development of autonomous vehicles and robotics. The funds will be allocated in tranches until 2025 to the company’s U.S. subsidiaries. The money will be used to develop artificial intelligence technologies as well as to expand developments in the field of unmanned electric vehicles.
Part of this sum will be spent on projects of Boston Dynamics, which joined Hyundai in 2021. According to the management of the Korean giant, the American developer has huge prospects and now needs to increase production capacity. The investment will allow Boston Dynamics to expand its product line and improve its approaches to creating robotics.
In addition to this firm, funds will also go to the Motional division, which is based in Boston. It is engaged in the creation of unmanned vehicles. Motional pays special attention to the safety of autonomous vehicles and also aims to make such electric cars more accessible to customers from different countries.
In addition, Hyundai plans to invest more than $5.5 billion in the creation of an electric car manufacturing plant. The facility will be built in Georgia and should produce about 300 thousand products annually. The erection of the object will begin in the next year.
The Korean corporation is actively developing the direction of ecological transport. In the spring of the current year, Hyundai presented a new car Elevate, which has four legs instead of traditional wheels. The limbs of all-wheel drive vehicles have peculiar joints that allow them to bend, and the wheels can rotate 360 degrees. In this way, the Elevate can step over objects, cope with obstacles and fix itself on surfaces at different angles.
The developers of Hyundai see the application of such a vehicle in agriculture, construction needs, the mining industry, and even space projects. The concern plans to create a two-seat version of the vehicle that will be able to transport people on board, for example, to provide medical assistance in hard-to-reach areas, disaster sites, and other locations that are difficult to reach by traditional means of transportation.
Another development by Hyundai is unmanned buses that run on a hydrogen engine. They were created in partnership with the South Korean government and are already in operation in the country. Over the course of two years, the authorities allocated about $18 billion for their development. The buses have a third level of autonomy, which is an excellent result for vehicles of this type.
It should be noted that not only Hyundai is actively developing the sector of unmanned vehicles, but the Korean government is also encouraging developers in this area with all its might. Between 2017 and 2021, the authorities invested $119 million in the industry, thanks to which they managed to register 12 patents for technologies related to autonomous vehicles.