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[Why Korea 24] Who's Building Korea's Self-Driving Future — And Where?

Autonomous car and flying air taxi over a Seoul cityscape, illustrating Korea's mobility future

In the last piece, I opened with a story about the driver's license I got 26 years ago, and ended up feeling pretty sober about the numbers.

Korea's autonomous driving industry was trailing far behind on the world map. Digging into it out of curiosity, what I found wasn't as impressive as I'd hoped it would be.

But while the government was busy redrawing its roadmap and strategy, Korean companies were already out there, each expanding their own turf.

So I went and looked at them, one by one.

Teaching Cars to Drive Themselves — Hyundai Motor Group and Motional

The first place that caught my eye was, oddly enough, the United States.

In March 2026, Motional — Hyundai Motor Group's autonomous driving joint venture — launched a robotaxi service with Uber in Las Vegas, using the Ioniq 5. These are SAE Level 4 vehicles, carrying real paying passengers through the city. By the end of the year, the plan is to go fully driverless, with no safety operator behind the wheel.

Las Vegas is a city where hotels, casinos, tourists, and traffic never stop colliding. It's a genuinely tough proving ground for a self-driving car. Motional picked this stage on purpose, carrying real passengers while it stress-tests the technology.

What's more interesting is the direction the technology itself is taking. Motional recently began moving away from hand-coded rules for every scenario, toward an end-to-end system where AI learns directly from massive amounts of driving data. In other words, the car's judgment is increasingly being built by data and AI, not by engineers writing rules one at a time.

From a company that makes great cars, to a company that builds systems that make judgment calls on their own.

Set aside the mileage gap we saw in the last piece — Hyundai Motor Group is already in a real fight, on a real stage.

Starting From Mobility, Not From the Car — Kakao Mobility

But there's a company looking at the exact same technology from a completely different angle.

If Hyundai Motor Group started from the car, Kakao Mobility started from how people move.

When Seoul's late-night Gangnam robotaxi service switched to paid rides in April 2026, Kakao Mobility joined as a new operator — meaning riders can now hail a self-driving car through the same Kakao T app they already use every day.

A self-driving car navigating the road safely and a person actually calling and boarding that car are two different problems. No matter how good the technology is, if hailing, paying, and boarding feel unfamiliar, autonomous driving stays a "tech demo" rather than a real service.

Kakao Mobility's edge isn't in building cars. It's in understanding when, where, and how people actually move — and turning that into a real transportation service.

That said, this also exposes homework Korea's mobility industry still has to do.

The company that builds the car and the company that owns the mobility platform each have real strengths. But in Korea, the two haven't quite fused into a single, fully connected autonomous driving ecosystem. Hardware, software, and platform are each moving at their own pace.

In the meantime, other companies are quietly racking up road experience across Korea. Startups like Autonomous A2Z, SWM, and RideFlux run their own vehicles in cities like Sejong, Daegu, and Gwangju, learning the messiness of Korean urban driving one trip at a time.

Behind the flashy headlines about robotaxis overseas, these are the companies grinding through Korea's toughest roads, day by day.

Moving to the Sky — Supernal

In 2000, the future I imagined when I got my license had flying cars in it.

Twenty-six years later, it turns out one of the places actually building that future is, once again, a car company.

Hyundai Motor Group's urban air mobility (UAM) subsidiary, Supernal, unveiled its next-generation aircraft, the S-A2, at CES 2024, and is developing it with a target of commercializing in the U.S. by 2028.

But here's where the story gets more complicated.

Supernal is developing and planning to commercialize its aircraft primarily in the U.S. Given America's aviation certification process, industrial ecosystem, and capital markets, targeting the global market first is a reasonable call.

Which means the fact that Hyundai Motor Group is building a flying future, and whether that future arrives in Korea first, are two separate questions.

In fact, Korea's own K-UAM commercialization target has already slipped from 2025 to 2028. Building the aircraft is only part of the job — safety certification, flight operation standards, air traffic management, and vertiport infrastructure all have to come together for an entirely new industry to exist.

Hyundai Motor Group is building a future where cars fly. Its opening act just isn't happening in Korea. It's happening in the U.S.

Line the Three Companies Up

Company Started From Headed Toward
Hyundai Motor Group / Motional Car manufacturing Autonomous driving, robotaxis
Kakao Mobility Mobility platform Autonomous driving services
Supernal Car manufacturing capability Urban air mobility

They started from different places.

But they're converging on the same question.

How do you move people and cargo more safely, and more seamlessly?

And the answer isn't being tested in just one place, either. The roads of Las Vegas, the alleys of Gangnam, the test corridors of Sejong and Pangyo, and American airspace — each running its own experiment, all at once.

So, Why Korea?

In the last piece, I wrote that Korea was trailing far behind on the world map.

That's still true.

But writing this piece, I saw something a little different, too.

These scattered speeds will eventually meet somewhere.

Hyundai Motor Group is fighting its battle on American roads, Supernal in American skies, each in its own way. Meanwhile, Kakao Mobility and Korea's domestic autonomous driving startups are building real services and racking up data in Korea's complicated cities.

You can no longer judge Korea's mobility industry by looking only at Korean roads.

Korean companies racking up real-world experience abroad first, then bringing that experience back to Korea's own industry — that may turn out to be one of the most important ways Korea closes the gap.

The future I imagined 26 years ago still isn't on Korea's roads.

But some of the hands building that future already belong to Korean companies.

Curious about Korea?

So am I.

Key Takeaways

  • Hyundai Motor Group's Motional launched a robotaxi pilot with Uber in Las Vegas in March 2026, using SAE Level 4 Ioniq 5 vehicles, and aims for fully driverless commercial service by the end of the year.
  • Kakao Mobility joined Seoul's Gangnam late-night robotaxi service as a new operator when it moved to paid rides in April 2026 — approaching autonomous driving through its mobility platform and app experience rather than car manufacturing.
  • Domestic autonomous driving startups — Autonomous A2Z, SWM, and RideFlux — are logging real-world driving data in cities like Sejong, Daegu, and Gwangju.
  • Hyundai Motor Group's Supernal is targeting U.S. commercialization of urban air mobility by 2028; Korea's own K-UAM target has slipped from 2025 to 2028 as well.
  • Korea's mobility future depends not just on its domestic roads, but on the real-world experience Korean companies are racking up abroad.

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