Unveiled last year, the Ioniq 5 now stands out as an autonomous taxi on the streets of Seoul. A way for Hyundai to demonstrate the capabilities of its level 4 autonomous driving technology … but without taking any risks: a driver remains relevant.
Hyundai is starting to test in real conditions, on the Ioniq 5, with its level 4 autonomous technology – completely autonomous driving in certain scenarios. To do this, the Korean giant is relying on a “RoboRide” autonomous taxi service. Inaugurated last week in Seoul, in the Gangnam district, this new service differs from the eponymous races already offered in the United States. InsideEVs specifies that a driver remains relevant to take control in the event of a problem.
It should be noted that across the Atlantic similar services, but without any driver, have existed for a few months already, like Waymo One from Alphabet with a pilot program in Phoenix. For the moment, Hyundai does not specify when its fleet of autonomous Ioniq 5 will be able to completely get rid of a human presence behind the wheel. We just know that these taxis can handle up to three passengers per trip.
Taxis that can be called directly from an app
Calling one of these RoboRide taxis from the streets of Seoul couldn’t be simpler. Just go through a dedicated application, called iM Motorized by artificial intelligence developed by the start-up Jun Mobility, the latter more or less resumes the same operation as other applications of the same type, such as the one used by Waymo and Cruise.
” At Hyundai Motor Group, we are developing Level 4 autonomous driving technology based on the in-house developed Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), whose functionality and safety are proven by mass production and commercial launch. successful. We believe that this trial RoboRide service will be an important inflection point that will allow us to internalize autonomous driving technology “, we comment at Hyundai.
For the firm, the objective of this service is to serve as a full-scale test for its autonomous driving technology. If things follow their course correctly, the end result will be the integration of this technology into production vehicles… so that the general public can benefit from it.
One question remains: why limit ourselves to the single district of Gangnam when Seoul has 25? Because of the equipment necessary for the exchange of data, essential for this experiment. Hyundai and the Gangnam district have been collaborating since 2019 for the installation of intelligent traffic lights allowing communication with the autonomous vehicle… and the collection of the significant amount of data used by Hyundai to refine its technology.
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