South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group is launching a new business to produce EVs to order, according to customer preferences. It is designed to be used for corporate purposes such as delivery and car sharing, and the body design and loading capacity can be flexibly changed to suit the intended use.
The company will take advantage of the characteristics of EVs, which have a higher degree of freedom in design than gasoline vehicles. The company will also introduce a business model that does not involve mass production to accelerate the growth of its EV business.
Kia, a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Company, announced a “standard platform” with onboard batteries and motors. On top of this platform, the interior, including the driver’s seat, cargo space, and body can be assembled according to the customer’s needs.
It is expected to be possible to increase the battery capacity for long-distance driving. The company expects its customers to include logistics companies, car-sharing services, and operators of small community buses. The timing and price of the business will be decided in the future, but it is rare for a major automobile company to develop an EV business where the specifications are drastically changed according to the customers.
Source: The Nikkei
PSR Analysis: The Hyundai Motor Group will take advantage of its collaboration with startups for this new business. The business model of freely changing the vehicle design will leverage the expertise of British EV maker Arrival, which invested 100 million Euros (about 12.5 billion yen) in 2020. The company has received an order for 10,000 delivery EVs from UPS, a major logistics company in the U.S., and the order value will reach one billion dollars. They are building a new plant in the US.
Not only Hyundai, but automakers’ alliance strategies with IT companies and the enclosure of startups are intensifying. There are customized production methods as well, for example, custom-made mountings for commercial vehicles. But their concept is very different from the conventional concept of automobile production, which requires a large factory.
For the Arrival vehicle, there is no assembly line in the Arrival factory, but rather autonomous vehicles that move between booths to carry parts. The vehicle body is manufactured by joining extruded aluminum parts rather than metal stamping. It is based on a concept similar to manufacturing a smartphone. In fact, the owner of Arrival was once the founder of a Russian smartphone company. It remains to be seen on what scale Hyundai will implement such a concept in the future. But at least at this point, the wave of change is big enough to seriously consider such a concept. PSR
Akihiro Komuro is Research Analyst, Far East and Southeast Asia, for Power Systems Research.
