Hyundai autonomous cars on city streets by 2020

Hyundai autonomous cars are officially confirmed to arrive in the full-fledged, self-driving state in 2030, according to the company. It seems that Hyundai is joining the ranks of Toyota, Google and more in the autonomous cars business with new investments going into the development of their own self-driving vehicles. The company says that Hyundai autonomous cars will be fully automated by 2020, when a commercial variant of them will be made available.

Seeing as completely autonomous cars are not yet where they need to be, Hyundai is putting loads of effort and money into being among the first ones to deliver a vehicle that won’t need your interference. Ever. According to a report from a Korean news outlet, Hyundai wants to start rolling out autonomous vehicles in 2020, but at the same time expects fully autonomous cars to flood city streets by 2030. Although the timeline seems outstretched, it does provide insight into Hyundai’s plans for their future vehicles and the degree of automation they want to achieve with them.

Google, Tesla, Mercedes, General Motors and even Apple are supposedly working on their own autonomous cars, and most of their timelines are similar to the one presented by Hyundai. That means that there’s going to be fierce competition in the automated vehicles industry once it truly kicks off in a decade or so. Hyundai aims to be the frontrunner, now it remains to be seen which company gets fully autonomous cars to market first.

According to Hyundai, their initial investment in autonomous cars is about $73 billion, and some of that money will be directed at building new, special factories across the world. These factories and QHs will be home to more than 7000 researchers who specialize in automating vehicles and engineering software, as well as hardware. With that investment, Hyundai has a real shot at becoming the world’s first company to deliver fully autonomous cars to the average drivers.