Hyundai Kicks Gas Again in the Driverless Taxi Business with the Ioniq 5

JAKARTA - The Hyundai Ioniq 5 has previously been used for robot taxi services and has become the autonomous vehicle of choice for several start-ups. Now, the electric car is preparing to take on a much bigger role, as Hyundai is getting more serious about entering the autonomous taxi service business.

The CES 2026 stage is an important moment for Motional, the autonomous vehicle division under the Hyundai umbrella. At the technology exhibition, Motional announced its target to launch a commercial robot taxi service in Las Vegas, USA, by the end of this year.

The service will be run in conjunction with one of the main online transportation networks. The fleet to be used is the Hyundai Ioniq 5 which has been equipped with a complete technology package ranging from sensors, software, AI systems, to hardware developed together with Hyundai.

With this move, Hyundai is trying to do something that has previously made many major manufacturers bleed in building a truly sustainable internal autonomous taxi division. This ambition comes at a time when many other players have fallen.

General Motors, for example, abandoned its Cruise project after it had lost $10 billion. Meanwhile, Ford and Volkswagen withdrew from Argo AI when their robot taxi service seemed to be almost entering the launch phase.

However, Motional CEO Laura Major emphasized that Hyundai chose to play in the long term. According to him, investing in autonomy is not a short-term project, but is closely related to Hyundai's big bets in the future including humanoid robots.

At CES, Hyundai also revealed plans to place robot workers in its factories this decade through another subsidiary, Boston Dynamics.

"I think Hyundai is committed to robotics, autonomy, and AI. They see it having a profound impact on the world. And autonomy will come to the world for the first time through a robot taxi," Major said, quoted from InsideEVs, Tuesday, January 13.

But Motional's challenge is clearly not light. At a time when Motional is only targeting major expansion in one city, Waymo is said to be targeting a presence in more than two dozen cities by the end of 2026.

The competition for autonomous vehicle technology is getting tighter, filled with more established players who already have running services. The big question is, can Motional really stand out in this competitive arena?

Or, the biggest impact of this project will not be felt from the robot taxi service, but rather the autonomous technology that will be transferred to the next generation of Hyundai cars. Interestingly, Motional was not actually born as a fully Hyundai division.

The company's roots come from two early players in the autonomous vehicle industry, nuTonomy and Ottomatika, which grew out of MIT and Carnegie Mellon in the early 2010s. Both were later acquired by Delphi, which was once a General Motors subsidiary and was renamed Aptiv.

After that, Aptiv entered into a partnership with Hyundai in a joint venture worth 4 billion US dollars. From here, the name Motional emerged and had recorded more than 100,000 public trials through Uber and Lyft, with the hope that commercial services could follow in 2022.

But the journey has not been smooth. Testing is still underway with a human safety operator behind the wheel, but losses are widening, Aptiv is reducing its ownership, waves of layoffs are happening, and commercial operations will be stopped by 2024.

The following year, Laura Major was appointed CEO after serving for a long time as CTO. She admitted that one of Motional's biggest obstacles at the time was the unreasonable cost of building a truly profitable business.

"We really realized that even though we could make a safe driverless system, the technology at the time was not cost-effective enough to create a profitable business," Major said.

He also dismissed the notion that driverless systems could be immediately applied to various cities once they were developed. The difficult phase is in line with what is often referred to as the autonomous winter, a period when several AV projects crashed after the big hype and massive investment in the 2010s.

Now Motional believes the situation is different. The key to change, Major said, is the explosion of artificial intelligence. With a neural network approach, autonomous vehicles no longer need to be intensively retrained for each city that is the target of operations.

"That was the 'aha' moment for us. AI technology is believed to make the system more flexible, easier to generalize, and move more smoothly," he said.

However, Motional is not completely abandoning the old approach. The company is still combining rule-based software that is the foundation of traditional robotics with end-to-end AI models, in order to deal with difficult cases that have often made autonomous vehicles stumble.