Hyundai Motor Group is stepping up its autonomous driving development by putting a data-driven development cycle into full operation and integrating real-world driving data into the continuous improvement of its AI systems.
The group held its Autonomous Driving Media Day at 42dot’s headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, on Sept. 11, where it introduced its development strategy, technology roadmap and recent progress.
A key highlight was the first public release of footage showing an SDV test vehicle equipped with the group’s proprietary autonomous driving AI, Atria AI, navigating complex urban roads without driver intervention. The system is currently being developed toward Level 2++ capabilities.
Hyundai Motor Group is building a “data flywheel” that continuously links data collection, AI training, validation and deployment. The approach allows driving data gathered from real roads to be used to identify difficult scenarios, improve AI models and feed upgraded systems back into vehicles.
The group is also applying technologies designed to identify challenging driving situations and continuously retrain AI models. Virtual testing is being used to recreate complex or difficult-to-repeat road conditions, while development teams in Korea and the United States operate across time zones to maintain a continuous development cycle.
Hyundai Motor Group currently operates more than 40 dedicated vehicles for collecting driving data, including information from construction zones, adverse weather, sudden lane changes and other challenging road conditions.
For commercialization, the group is pursuing a dual-track strategy. It plans to integrate NVIDIA’s automotive AI computing platform and autonomous driving technologies into its software-defined vehicle architecture, targeting Level 2+ commercialization in the first half of 2028 and Level 2++ vehicles later that year.
At the same time, Hyundai Motor Group and 42dot are advancing Atria AI as their proprietary autonomous driving platform, with the goal of commercializing Atria AI-based Level 2++ vehicles in the second half of 2029.
42dot is also developing next-generation autonomous driving technology based on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. By combining visual understanding, language-based reasoning and vehicle actions, the technology could provide a foundation for expanding autonomous driving capabilities into broader Physical AI applications, including robotics.
The group plans to conduct Level 4 autonomous driving demonstrations as well. Atria AI-based test vehicles are scheduled to be deployed in Jeonnam-Gwangju Integrated Special City by the end of the year, with data gathered from the demonstrations to be fed back into the AI development cycle.
Park Min-woo, president of Hyundai Motor and Kia’s AVP Division and CEO of 42dot, said the key to autonomous driving competition lies in how quickly companies can turn data into learning and ultimately into products.
