Hyundai’s 42dot to close gap with Tesla, Waymo in autonomous driving

Hyundai Motor Group’s autonomous driving subsidiary, 42dot, is accelerating its drive to narrow the technology gap with industry leaders Tesla and Waymo.

“Once the group begins commercial production of our autonomous driving system, we expect to surpass our competitors in real-world data volumes within five years,” Park said.

Kwon Jung-hyun, the group’s newly appointed head of the autonomous driving development center, noted that deploying Nvidia’s commercial solution first provides crucial mass-production experience for Hyundai.

Currently, among Hyundai’s 40 Ioniq 6-based test cars, or pace cars, around 10 to 20 units are dedicated exclusively to autonomous driving tests, while others serve general software-defined vehicle (SDV) validation.

As a dual-track strategy, 42dot is developing Vision-Language-Action models that add language reasoning capabilities to traditional Vision-Action End-to-End models such as the Atria AI.