Hyundai’s new innovation chief says mobility services are priority number one
Seoul — In the future of transportation, what would you get if you mixed the business models of Tesla, Google and Samsung Electronics with the budget of the world’s fifth-biggest vehicle maker? Youngcho Chi is about to find out. Hired from Samsung, Chi has assembled a team of 200 strategists and researchers at Hyundai, the 50-year-old South Korean car maker that fought its way to the top echelon of the auto world and is now struggling to stem flagging sales in some of its biggest markets. His job is to catapult Hyundai into the forefront of technologies that are upending transportation. Late to the game, Hyundai is developing vehicles and software systems for a planned driverless taxi service to compete with both its traditional rivals like Nissan and General Motors, and tech companies such as Waymo, the unit of Google’s parent Alphabet that has vowed to offer fully autonomous cars for public use soon. "The most urgent task for us is the mobility service," said Chi, chief innovation...
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