Former Tesla and Nvidia executives are in charge of Hyundai's autonomous driving business and are aiming for mass production in 2029

The Zhitong Finance App learned that earlier this year, Minwoo Park, who worked on autonomous driving technology research and commercialization at Nvidia (NVDA.US) and Tesla (TSLA.US), was appointed as the head of Hyundai Motor Group's autonomous driving department, becoming the youngest division president of the car company. The appointment aims to strengthen Hyundai's competitiveness and accelerate product development in software-defined vehicles and autonomous driving-related software. Minwoo Park's professional background is expected to drive the Group's rapid development in this field.

Minwoo Park took over a division torn apart by infighting and lagging behind rivals like Tesla in the race to improve driverless cars. How bad was Hyundai's driver-assistance software? In 2023, Hyundai was at the bottom of the “Consumer Report” ranking of more than ten US car companies in such a system. Progress in making up for the shortcoming has been slow, which ultimately prompted Euisun Chung, the group's executive chairman, to recruit the 48-year-old executive to strengthen the group's autonomous driving business segment.

Minwoo Park now faces the difficult task of catching up with rivals such as Tesla and BYD that have introduced urban road navigation technology. Being left behind in the industry's fastest-growing sector — Morgan Stanley estimates that the market size could reach $200 billion by 2030 — will threaten Hyundai's position as the world's third-largest car company, as consumers increasingly value driver assistance features in car buying decisions.

Since taking office in February, Minwoo Park has implemented a drastic overhaul — breaking down departmental barriers between software teams and engineers, unifying priorities, and speeding up decision-making. He said that although the change in corporate culture takes time, he has noticed that the team is now spending more time discussing products rather than fighting infighting. Minwoo Park said, “Hyundai Motor Group has neither a shortage of technology nor talent. The challenge is collaboration.”

Minwoo Park was born and raised in Korea and received a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering at Korea University. Since then, he earned his master's and doctorate degrees in computer science and engineering from Penn State University. There, he turned his professional direction to computer vision—he called it the best decision he ever made in his life.

Minwoo Park spent her graduate career at Penn State University's Computer Vision Research Laboratory, studying how computers extract and interpret information from images and videos, then worked at Eastman Kodak Co. (Eastman Kodak Co.) and ObjectVideo to develop computer vision technology for automatically determining the location of images and videos.

Since then, he joined Tesla, participated in leading the camera-centered “Tesla Vision,” and won the Electric Vehicle Pioneer's Top Talent Award in 2016. He then switched to Nvidia and was promoted all the way to vice president, responsible for a driverless software team covering perception, sensor fusion, and machine learning. When he decided to switch to Hyundai, Nvidia CEO Hwang In-hoon congratulated the change, saying Minwoo Park would take on “an extremely important role for the Korean industry.”

Minwoo Park said, “At Tesla, I realized that real-world data is the key to ultimately improving AI. At Nvidia, I understood that success requires not only AI models, but also the computing power, software, and infrastructure needed to deploy them on a large scale.”

Hyundai's autonomous driving technology has never really surpassed basic highway driving, and has failed to leap into complex urban streets. But that is about to change. In a video released this month showing the company's next generation system — called Atria AI — Minwoo Park sits in the passenger seat of an Ioniq 6. The vehicle bypasses parked vehicles in the rain, made an unprotected left turn, and walked through the narrow streets of Seoul. Minwoo Park personally tests the system every week — similar to Tesla, the system mainly relies on cameras to plan routes in real time, just like a human driver.

To close the gap, Hyundai is fundamentally changing the way it builds autonomous vehicles. Instead of relying on scattered sensors and components from traditional suppliers, the car company turned the vehicle into a data acquisition machine driven by Nvidia's top AI chip.

According to Minwoo Park's plan, Hyundai will use Nvidia's system to launch upgraded driver assistance functions by 2028. As millions of new Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis cars with the same cameras hit the road, they will continue to send a steady stream of real-world driving data back to the company. This huge stream of daily traffic data will train Atria AI to pave the way for mass production of vehicles capable of crossing city streets in 2029.

KJ Hwang, head of Korean automotive and industrial research at Bank of America's Global Research Division, said, “Tesla's progress in fully autonomous driving highlights the need for Hyundai to catch up faster. We're still in the early stages, and it's too early to draw conclusions.”

Despite Hyundai's backwardness, Minwoo Park is betting that Hyundai's massive scale — which sold more than Tesla and BYD combined last year — will give it the advantage of a rapid training system to catch up with the current leader in autonomous driving when Atria is deployed in 2029.

On Hyundai CEO Investor Day last month, Minwoo Park told investors and analysts that its real-world fleet data will level and eventually surpass rivals around 2033. “If we work harder, I really think commercialization can be achieved faster,” he said at a media conference this month. But he was also wary of “rushing to launch a semi-finished product function in order to seize the market.”

According to Seonggyun Jeong, head of Atria AI development, Minwoo Park requires engineers to focus on training AI to handle unusual and complex dangerous road conditions rather than everyday driving images, which has greatly accelerated progress.

Further, Hyundai wants to launch fully autonomous L4 (Level 4) vehicles — similar to Waymo driverless taxis operating in the US — and plans to test around 200 Ioniq 5s in the southwestern city of Gwangju later this year.

Of course, Hyundai is not the only company facing growth problems. General Motors (GM.US) Cruise's driverless taxi division was shut down after experiencing many high-profile safety incidents and burning billions of dollars. Tesla's full self-driving (Full Self-Driving) doesn't live up to its name; it still requires constant human supervision and is being investigated after a series of fatal accidents; yet the promotion of its driverless taxis has so far fallen far short of CEO Elon Musk's ambitious promises.

Despite this, some analysts appreciate the changes Minwoo Park has brought and are optimistic that he is injecting new life into Hyundai's autonomous driving ambitions. Brian Lee, an analyst at Lyon Securities Korea, said, “Until the end of last year, anyone was asked about the company's future of autonomous driving and could hardly say anything positive. But he sent a clear signal — there will be no further delays.”