Hyundai Motor Group Executive Vice Chairman Chung Eui-sun poses with Aptive CEO Kevin Clark after they signed a deal to establish a self-driving joint venture at Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York on Sept. 23. (Photo: Hyundai Motor)

Hyundai Motor Group Executive Vice Chairman Chung Eui-sun had an unannounced meeting with reporters at a Chinese restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, New York, on Sept. 23. Chung abruptly appeared at the private meeting between Korean press correspondents and Hyundai Motor executives.

Executive Vice Chairman Chung, wearing casual attire and no necktie, answered a long list of questions from reporters.

The meeting was rare since he had shunned interviews with reporters, except official ones held during motor shows and other events, since he took office as executive vice chairman of the group. The move may be construed as his bid to have a high profile to launch the full-fledged “Executive Vice Chairman Chung Era.”

On the same day, Hyundai Motor announced the Korean automaker struck a deal to establish a joint venture with Aptive. The latter is an American self-driving technology leader, which is on par with the self-driving juggernauts like Waymo, a stand-alone subsidiary of Google.

The latest deal to establish the self-driving joint venture Aptive has catapulted Hyundai Motor, a self-driving car latecomer, to a leader in the future automobile market.

Hyundai Motor’s a joint venture with Aptive, rather than an equity investment, is designed to supply products to all other global automakers, opening up other opportunities, he said.

“If solutions developed by us are excellent, other automakers will use the technologies of the joint venture,” Executive Vice Chairman Chung said. His remarks may be interpreted as Hyundai Motor Group’s bid to reshape itself from an automaker to a “software company.”

Kim Jin-woo, a researcher with Korea Investment & Securities, said Hyundai Motor Group sees its investment paradigm from hardware technologies, such as plants to software.

The group’s latest investment is significant since it plunked down huge money on intangible technology for the first time, he said.

“Self-driving cars will be operated for a trial run around late 2022, and they are expected to be mass produced starting 2024,” he said. Developing self-driving cars is required to accumulate driving data and educate AI.

Aptive has been accumulating driving data in cooperation with the ride-sharing company Lyft, through which Hyundai Motor plans to develop solutions.

Koh Tae-bong, head of Hi Investment & Securities Research, said Hyundai Motor’s containing self-driving solutions to its EV platform and selling their modules to other automakers will be value-added.

Volkswagen has already announced a plan to supply an EV platform to Ford. Autonomous systems will be handed over to ride-sharing companies such as Grab of Southeast Asia and Ola of India to operate robot taxis.

If self-driving cars are upgraded to the extent that they can go to places consumers want, Chung said, they will likely make their debut around 2030, which he said was a conservative estimate. Now that self-driving cars consume lots of power, he said there will be problems using current EV batteries.

Hydrogen cars with high energy density and long mileage would be good self-driving platforms, said Chung, who expressed confidence in the hydrogen fuel cell cars Hyundai Motor is now developing. Flying cars can be commercialized ahead of the release of full-fledged self-driving cars, he said.

Executive Vice Chairman Chung Tours 2019 International Motor Show Germany

Hyundai Motor Group Executive Vice Chairman Chung toured Frankfurt, the venue of the 2019 International Motor Show Germany, on Sept. 10 to look into EV and self-driving car trends.

Chung’s latest tour came 10 months after he made his first public appearance at the 2018 LA Auto Show in Los Angeles last November.

His tour to the German Motor Show may be construed as his attempts to expand his activities to have an insight into EV cars, hydrogen cars, self-driving cars and other future cars and flesh out more detailed strategies.