Former Tesla and NVIDIA executives head Hyundai Motor's autonomous driving business, aiming for mass production in 2029

According to Zhitong Finance APP, earlier this year, Minwoo Park—who previously worked on autonomous driving technology research and commercialization at Nvidia (NVDA.US) and Tesla (TSLA.US)—was appointed as Head of Hyundai Motor Group’s Autonomous Driving Division, making him the youngest division president in the automaker’s history. This appointment aims to strengthen Hyundai’s competitiveness in software-defined vehicles and autonomous driving software, accelerating product development. Leveraging Minwoo Park’s professional background is expected to drive rapid progress in this field for the group.

Minwoo Park has taken over a division that was fractured by internal strife and lagged behind competitors like Tesla in the race to perfect autonomous vehicles. How poor was Hyundai’s driver assistance software? In 2023, a Consumer Reports ranking of similar systems among more than a dozen U.S. automakers placed Hyundai dead last. The lack of meaningful progress in addressing these shortcomings ultimately prompted Executive Chairman Euisun Chung to bring in the 48-year-old executive to bolster the group’s autonomous driving business segment.

Minwoo Park now faces the daunting task of catching up to competitors like Tesla and BYD that have already launched urban road navigation technologies. Falling behind in the fastest-growing sector of the industry—Morgan Stanley estimates the market could reach $200 billion by 2030—would jeopardize Hyundai’s position as the world’s third-largest automaker, as consumers increasingly weigh driver assistance features in their car-buying decisions.

Since taking office in February, Minwoo Park has implemented sweeping reforms—breaking down silos between software teams and engineers, aligning priorities, and speeding up decision-making. He noted that although changing corporate culture takes time, he has already observed that teams now spend more time discussing products rather than engaging in infighting. Minwoo Park stated, "There is no shortage of technology or talent at Hyundai Motor Group. The challenge is in collaboration."

Born and raised in South Korea, Minwoo Park attended Korea University, earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering. He then received his master’s and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering from Pennsylvania State University, where he shifted his specialization to computer vision—a move he calls the best decision of his life.

Minwoo Park spent his graduate years at Penn State’s computer vision research lab, studying how computers extract and interpret information from images and video. He then worked at Eastman Kodak Co. and ObjectVideo, developing computer vision technology to automatically determine the geographical location of images and videos.

Subsequently, he joined Tesla, helping to lead the camera-centric “Tesla Vision,” and in 2016 won the electric vehicle pioneer’s top talent award. He later moved to Nvidia, rising to vice president in charge of the autonomous driving software team covering perception, sensor fusion, and machine learning. When he decided to join Hyundai Motor, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offered his best wishes, saying Minwoo Park would play "an extremely important role for South Korea's industry."

Minwoo Park stated, "At Tesla, I realized that data from the real world is the ultimate key to enhancing AI. At Nvidia, I learned that success requires not only AI models, but also the computing power, software, and infrastructure to deploy them at scale."

Hyundai’s autonomous driving technology has never truly surpassed basic highway driving and has failed to make the leap to complex urban streets. But that is about to change. In a video released this month demonstrating the company’s next-generation system—called Atria AI—Minwoo Park sits in the passenger seat of an Ioniq 6, as the vehicle navigates around parked cars in the rain, makes unprotected left turns, and drives through the narrow alleys of Seoul. Minwoo Park personally test-drives the system every week—similar to Tesla, it primarily relies on cameras for real-time route planning, just like a human driver.

To close the gap, Hyundai is fundamentally changing its approach to building autonomous vehicles. Instead of relying on disparate sensors and traditional supplier components, the automaker is transforming its vehicles into data-collection machines powered by Nvidia’s top-tier AI chips.

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 vehicles equipped with the same cameras hit the road, they will continuously send real-world driving data back to the company. This massive stream of daily road condition data will train Atria AI, paving the way for mass production of vehicles capable of navigating city streets by 2029.

KJ Hwang, head of Korea Autos & Industrials Research at Bank of America Global Research, said, "The progress Tesla has made in full self-driving underscores the need for Hyundai to accelerate its efforts to catch up. We are still in the early stages, so it is too soon to draw firm conclusions."

Despite being behind, Minwoo Park is betting on Hyundai’s huge scale—last year’s sales surpassed the combined total of Tesla and BYD—to give it an advantage in rapidly training systems, enabling it to catch up with current leaders in autonomy by the time Atria is deployed in 2029.

At Hyundai Motor’s CEO Investor Day last month, Minwoo Park told investors and analysts that its real-world fleet data will catch up to and eventually surpass rivals by around 2033. At a media briefing this month, he said, "If we work harder, I truly believe we can achieve commercialization faster." However, he also warned against "rushing unfinished features to market just to grab share."

According to Atria AI development chief Seonggyun Jeong, Minwoo Park has instructed engineers to focus on training AI to handle unusual, complex road incident scenarios rather than everyday driving footage, which has sped up progress considerably.

Looking further ahead, Hyundai aims to launch fully autonomous Level 4 (L4) vehicles—similar to Waymo’s robo-taxis operating in the United States—and plans to test about 200 Ioniq 5 vehicles in the southwestern city of Gwangju later this year.

Of course, Hyundai is not the only automaker facing growing pains. General Motors’ (GM.US) Cruise robo-taxi division was shut down after a series of high-profile safety incidents and burning through billions of dollars. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving is somewhat of a misnomer, still requiring constant human oversight and is under investigation following several fatal accidents; meanwhile, the rollout of its robo-taxi fleet has so far fallen well short of CEO Elon Musk’s ambitious promises.

Nevertheless, some analysts appreciate the changes Minwoo Park has brought and are optimistic about the new momentum he has injected into Hyundai’s autonomous driving ambitions. Brian Lee, an analyst at CLSA Korea, commented, "Until the end of last year, if anyone asked about the company’s autonomous driving prospects, there was hardly anything positive to say. But now, he has sent a clear signal—there will be no more delays."