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Hyundai Places Minwoo Park's Data Flywheel at Center of Self-Driving Catch-Up

September 21, 2026 at 17:15 EDT

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Hyundai Motor Group is putting Minwoo Park, a former Tesla and NVIDIA autonomy executive, at the center of a new push to narrow its self-driving gap with Tesla and BYD. The company said it has put its Data Flywheel into full operation, linking vehicle data, AI training, validation and deployment as it targets supervised Level 2+ production in the first half of 2028 and Level 2++ production in the second half of 2028.

Sep. 2026 / Hyundai Motor Group

Hyundai's self-driving catch-up plan

Minwoo Park is steering a dual-track autonomy roadmap: deploy NVIDIA-based supervised assistance first, then mature Hyundai's own Atria AI through a data flywheel.

H1 2028

Level 2+ production target

H2 2028

Level 2++ NVIDIA track

H2 2029

Atria AI vehicle target

>7M

annual Hyundai and Kia sales

Scale becomes the data engine

>7Mvehicles a year

Each block represents about 1 million annual vehicle sales.

The bet is that a global production footprint, standardized sensors and dedicated collection vehicles can feed better training data back into Atria AI.

The flywheel loop

Collect road data

→

Train AI models

→

Validate edge cases

→

Deploy updates

The hard part is trust

Hyundai's demos show urban progress, but the consumer product must still prove supervised assistance can handle rare cases reliably before Atria AI becomes a market advantage.

Upside

Park's autonomy background plus Hyundai's scale create a credible data path.

Limit

The key production targets remain in 2028 and 2029, and Level 2++ is still supervised.

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