Hyundai Motor will bring its proprietary Atria AI autonomous driving system into production in the second half of 2029, following Nvidia-based systems arriving a year earlier.
The rollout plan was detailed at the company's HMG Autonomous Driving Media Day, forming part of a dual-track strategy agreed with Nvidia in March.
Under the first track, Hyundai will integrate Nvidia's vehicle AI computing platform and autonomous driving software into its software-defined vehicle architecture.
Production models with Nvidia-based level 2+ functionality are due in the first half of 2028, with level 2++ variants following in the second half of that year.
Sensor systems across Hyundai Motor, Kia, 42dot, which is the official global software centre for the automaker, and Motional will be progressively unified around Nvidia DRIVE Hyperion 10.
The second track sees the AVP Division and 42dot building Atria AI, the in-house end-to-end autonomous driving system.
Level 2++ vehicles running on Atria AI are scheduled for production in the second half of 2029, around 12 months after their Nvidia-based equivalents.
Both tracks are underpinned by the group's Data Flywheel, now fully functional, which the company describes as a continuous loop spanning data gathering, AI training, validation and deployment.
The system is fed data from Hyundai Motor and Kia's combined yearly sales exceeding 7 million vehicles across roughly 190 markets, supported by around 40 dedicated data collection vehicles operating on an ongoing basis.
The group said it has folded several new components into the system since the start of the year.
These include hard example mining to flag challenging driving scenarios, a continuous training pipeline, and virtual validation technology that applies 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct real-world data as three-dimensional environments.
Also added are a follow-the-sun arrangement linking teams in South Korea and the US, along with integration of its special event recorder system.
A data union framework is additionally being set up to unify sensor architectures and data structures across Hyundai Motor, Kia, 42dot and Motional.
The group is also collaborating with South Korea's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport on real-world level 4 validation, with an Atria AI-equipped SDV pace car set for deployment in Jeonnam-Gwangju special metropolitan city before year-end.
42dot also gave an update on its vision-language-action (VLA) technology, developed alongside Atria AI's existing end-to-end models.
The company said VLA-based technology is currently at the simulation-based model validation stage, with real-vehicle testing expected to start between late 2026 and early 2027.
Hyundai Motor advanced vehicle platform division president & head and 42dot CEO Minwoo Park said: “At its core, autonomous driving competitiveness comes down to having systems that enable continuous, rapid learning. Hyundai Motor will develop autonomous driving technology that customers can trust, based on a virtuous cycle of data, AI and validation. Our goal is to ensure the safety and quality levels customers can trust while we learn and improve rapidly.”
