Hyundai bets on robotaxis with an investment of nearly one billion dollars in Motional

The South Korean manufacturer is set to gain control of Motional, a company dedicated to passenger transport using autonomous vehicles. To do so, Hyundai will invest a total of nearly one billion dollars. This will allow it to acquire the majority of the company’s shares.

According to the latest reports, Hyundai will invest directly in Motional 475 million dollars. To this must be added an additional investment of another 448 million dollars in order to also acquire a stake that Aptiv holds in Motional. Aptiv, for its part, has announced that it will reduce its total stake in the company from 50 to 15 percent. This will ultimately leave Hyundai’s stake in Motional at 85 percent.

Last January, Kevin Clark, Aptiv’s current Chief Executive Officer, already announced that the firm he leads intended to reduce its stake in Motional. At the time, he justified this decision by the high cost of commercializing a robotaxi service and the long road ahead before reaching profitability.

Motional has been testing its robotaxi service in several cities in the United States for some time, although for now always with a safety driver at the wheel just in case. Motional’s autonomous vehicles are already circulating through the streets of Boston, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The company has also made the leap into the Asian market, already being present in Singapore.

In the long term, the company aims to form alliances with other firms such as Uber, Lyft or Via to offer them its robotaxi service. However, Motional also plans to have its own robotaxi service, which should become a reality before the end of the year, using for this purpose adapted units equipped with all the necessary sensors from the Hyundai IONIQ 5.

In November 2023, Motional and Hyundai already announced their intention to cooperate to put this robotaxi-adapted version of the IONIQ 5 on the road. Likewise, during the past Consumer Electronics Show held as every year in Las Vegas, Motional announced its intention to work together with KIA on a new robotaxi that would see the light of day at the end of this decade.

There is still a long way to go before robotaxis become a regular reality in our lives

For several years now we have been promised that autonomous vehicles will completely change the way city dwellers get around on a day-to-day basis. However, those promises keep being postponed and have not yet come true. Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, currently seems the most advanced in this field, with a robotaxi service already operating in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

On the other hand, Cruise, its main competitor, recently had to suspend its operations following an incident last October, in which a pedestrian was run over and dragged by one of the company’s robotaxis. Cruise’s management, however, assures that they are working to restore the service in the city of Phoenix as soon as possible.

Technical specifications of this car

CrossoverHyundai IONIQ 58 versions · from 44,670 €