Hyundai’s autonomous joint venture with Aptiv has a new name: Motional. The company, which plans to test completely untested cars for service for riding dogs later this year, said the new name is meant to evoke the ‘movement’ of transport rather than the ’emotion’ of the decision to move safely to get somewhere.
The joint venture was first announced in March 2020, when Hyundai said it would spend $ 1.6 billion to pick up its rivals in the autonomous car space. Aptiv, a self-governing technology company that is an offshoot of Delphi’s global auto parts supplier, owns 50 percent of the venture.
Karl Iagnemma, the former CEO of self-drive Startup NuTonomy acquired by Delphi in 2017, is now President and CEO of Motional. In an interview, he said that the fleet of cars from the company that operates in Las Vegas, Singapore, and Seoul will soon be refueled with the brand “Motional”.
“Whether we like it or not these days transportation decisions are emotional decisions,” Iagnemma said. ‘That choosing how to get safely from A to B is an emotional decision. So Motional will keep that insight central to every product we develop. ”
Although the name may be new, Iagnemma concludes that the Motional team has worked hard to get cars to drive themselves long. Through NuTonomy, and then Delphi, and then Aptiv, and now Motional, the company’s engineers were responsible for the world’s first robotic taxi pilot in Singapore, as well as New York’s first cross-country autonomous trip to San Francisco. In the last two years, Aptiv’s fleet of security driver autonomous taxis in Las Vegas (in partnership with Lyft) has completed more than 100,000 trips.
The coronavirus pandemic has thrown a gear in the wrench of many autonomous auto projects. Public testing in the US and other countries was stopped for months. And experts now believe that the virus will make shared autonomous cars as taxis a more difficult sale for hygiene-conscious consumers. The collapse of Uber and Lyft’s business operations in the US seems to predict some of the difficulties that autonomous car developers will convince passengers to drive in their cars.
But Iagnemma sees it differently. He cited a survey recently conducted by Motional that found one in five people more interested in autonomous cars as a result of the pandemic. “What we do feels more and more important than ever,” he said.
Hyundai is not a complete stranger to self-driving cars. The company worked last year with a Chinese company called Pony.ai to test self-driving cars as taxis in Irvine, California. The cars were not completely driverless; a safety driver and an engineer rode in the driver and passenger seats of each car.
But the joint venture is a major financial contribution from the South Korean automaker. Hyundai together with Kia Motors will collectively contribute $ 1.6 billion in cash and $ 400 million in research and development resources and others, and value the joint venture $ 4 billion.
Unlike some of its competitors, Hyundai is receiving financial support from the Government of South Korea to boost its efforts in both autonomous and electric car development. South Korea plans to spend 1.7 trillion won ($ 1.4 trillion) between 2021 and 2027 on self-government technology. As a condition of receiving the support, though, Hyundai agrees to launch a fully autonomous fleet of cars for customers by 2024 and for the general public by 2027.
