Hyundai’s offering at this year’s CES seems to be yet another crossover, but this one will be a fuel cell vehicle with autonomous features. And Hyundai tapped some ex-Google and ex-Tesla people to do it. Yes, the concept is boring, but for an autonomous car maybe that’s fine? Let the normals have their driverless cars if they don’t want to drive.
Hyundai has partnered with Aurora, a company that designs and builds self-driving tech. At the helm are Chris Urmson and Sterling Anderson, ex-Google car chief and former director of Autopilot programs at Tesla, respectively. The aim is to deploy autonomous driving safely and quickly.
In a press release, Hyundai stated that it and Aurora will develop the hardware and software necessary to achieve Level 4 automation, as defined by the SAE.
The company chose a fuel-cell platform because it is the “ideal platform to implement autonomous driving technologies, which requires a massive amount of power to support the large amount of data communication as well as the operation of hardware such as sensors.”
Further details on the car aren’t available right now, but we’re looking forward to learning more when it debuts at CES.
If you read this news and felt and overwhelming sense of meh, then we are in the same boat. A beige crossover with some autonomous features? That doesn’t do much for the enthusiast and the driver-oriented corner of the market. But the market as of late hasn’t really concerned itself with us. Not really. You get one or two offerings here and there, but usually in very low volume.
If Hyundai winds up mass-producing this car, then good on them. Hopefully it will make them so much money that they won’t forget about us.