Park Min-woo, head of Hyundai Motor and Kia’s Advanced Vehicle Platform (AVP) Division and CEO of 42dot, has marked 200 days since his official appointment was announced. Since starting his role on February 23, Park has focused on applying the latest infotainment system, ‘Pleos Connect,’ to mass-produced vehicles and presenting a blueprint for autonomous driving, consistently emphasizing a transformation into an “execution”-focused organization. However, with assessments suggesting that tangible autonomous driving results for consumers remain limited, the Gwangju pilot program in the second half of the year and the technological competition with Tesla’s supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) have emerged as his core challenges.
Park’s first official engagement was a town hall meeting at the AVP Division’s research hub in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province, on March 5. There, he stressed a “one team” strategy, stating, “We must be reborn as an ‘execution’ organization that applies the technologies we develop to actual mass-produced vehicles without error.” He subsequently continued his internal and external activities, including Kia’s Investor Day, the Korea Land Transport Technology Expo, and the Busan Mobility Show. He also took on the role of fleshing out the group’s Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) and physical AI strategy by participating in a meeting between Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Chung Euisun and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the group’s Yangjae headquarters.
The most visible achievement under Park’s leadership is the mass-production application of Pleos Connect. Installed in the new Grandeur officially launched in May and the new Avante unveiled at the Busan Mobility Show in June, Pleos Connect served as the first test to prove the “execution” capability Park has emphasized. In particular, ‘Gleo AI,’ a large language model (LLM)-based in-vehicle voice agent, was developed by 42dot starting in 2024 and applied to a mass-produced vehicle within two years. Its key feature is the ability to communicate naturally with vehicle passengers. Park stated, “In the mid-to-long term, we will evolve it into a personalized AI that understands user behavior and preferences to assist with needs without being asked.” Pleos Connect is slated for application in various new models, including the Tucson, and will be installed in new Kia vehicles starting in 2027.
However, criticism persists that there is still a long way to go in the autonomous driving sector. Hyundai Motor Group’s autonomous driving technology has been assessed as lagging behind Tesla in terms of consumer-perceptible progress. Hong Se-jin, a senior researcher at NICE Credit Rating, analyzed, “Compared to the commercialization timeline of end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving by Tesla and XPeng in 2024, Hyundai’s autonomous driving timeline has a lag of about three to four years.” Behind this gap lies a series of strategic revisions. Hyundai initially focused on developing autonomous driving technology using LiDAR and high-definition maps but shifted its focus to a camera-based E2E approach with the acquisition of 42dot in 2022. Following Park’s appointment, the strategy was adjusted once again to leverage Big Tech platforms while concurrently developing its own AI models.
In March, Hyundai Motor Group formalized an expansion of its autonomous driving partnership with Nvidia. The group is developing a system scalable from Level 2 driver assistance to Level 4 autonomous driving based on Nvidia’s ‘Drive Hyperion’ autonomous driving platform and is reportedly reviewing the adoption of the ‘Alpha Mayo’ AI model. Lee Sang-su, an analyst at iM Securities, explained, “They can apply a highly polished external platform to mass-produced vehicles and then refine their proprietary autonomous driving system based on the data collected from it.” However, some in the industry voice concerns about the risk of technological dependency on Nvidia’s platform. Designing a system around a specific platform from the early stages of development can make future platform changes difficult and create vulnerability to chip price hikes or technology policy shifts.
Park’s top priority for the second half of the year is the autonomous driving pilot program to be conducted in the Gwangju metropolitan area. At the Korea Land Transport Technology Expo on June 24, he expressed confidence about the Ioniq 5-based autonomous vehicles to be deployed in Gwangju in the latter half of the year, calling them “a completely different car,” and revealed a strategy to secure leadership in the physical AI domain. The Gwangju pilot program is the first testbed to demonstrate the extent to which Park’s autonomous driving blueprint can be realized in real-world road environments.
Efforts to secure the talent to support this are also accelerating. On the 1st, Hyundai Motor Group recruited Executive Vice President Kim Dong-wook, who led the development of iPhone and vehicle wireless communication systems at Apple and Tesla, as head of the AVP Division’s SDV Platform Development Center. It also brought on Executive Vice President Jeremy Ma, who led robotics and autonomous driving software development at Apple, Toyota, and Nvidia, as head of the AVP Division’s Silicon Valley office. On the 30th, the group appointed Vice President Kwon Jung-hyun, who led intelligent robot development at Samsung Electronics and worked on autonomous driving software at Nvidia, as head of the Autonomous Driving Development Center. With a significant influx of talent from Tesla and Nvidia, Park has gained a strong team of allies. The remaining challenge, however, is successfully integrating the skills and experience of these executives from global companies into Hyundai Motor Group’s vehicle development system to deliver actual mass-produced cars.
Meanwhile, the weakening fundamentals of Hyundai’s core business and labor union risks are cited as factors that could diminish investment capacity for future ventures like autonomous driving. Hyundai’s vehicle division operating profit fell 25.7% from ₩11.41 trillion (approximately $8.0 billion) in 2024 to ₩8.47 trillion (approximately $5.9 billion) in 2025, and it recorded ₩1.99 trillion (approximately $1.4 billion) in the second quarter of this year, an 11.5% decline year-over-year. Added to this, U.S. tariff costs of ₩860 billion (approximately $601.5 million) were incurred in the first quarter alone, and production disruptions from union strikes are mounting. After wage negotiations broke down, Hyundai’s labor union staged a partial strike from July 13 to 15, and extended the strike to four-hour shifts per group from July 20 to 22. The industry estimates Hyundai’s hourly production disruption cost at approximately ₩18.7 billion (approximately $13.1 million), meaning an eight-hour daily strike is estimated to have caused revenue losses close to ₩150 billion (approximately $104.9 million).
By applying Pleos Connect and Gleo AI to mass-produced vehicles, laying out autonomous driving pilot plans, and securing specialized personnel, Park has achieved a degree of success in the initial stages of organizational structuring and technological blueprinting. Ultimately, however, his leadership is expected to be judged by the results of the upcoming Gwangju pilot program and the mass-production performance of ‘Atria AI’-based autonomous driving technology. The core challenges ahead are expanding the number of vehicle models equipped with Pleos Connect and delivering safe, highly reliable autonomous driving technology that can compete with Tesla’s FSD.