The Hyundai Nexo has just completed a 188km autonomous drive from Seoul to Pyeongchang, the first time level 4 autonomous driving has been realised with a fuel cell vehicle.
A FLEET OF HYUNDAI Nexo vehicles, the company’s new fuel cell SUV which will launch in Korea next month (replacing the ix35 fuel cell) has just completed a 188km journey. Autonomously. It’s the first time an autonomous journey with fuel cell electric vehicles has taken place.
Hyundai has said it will have autonomous cars on the road in ‘smart cities’ by 2021 and around the world by 2030. What’s a smart city? One that uses sensors and other electronic data collection points to monitor the city’s infrastructure. Cities that have smart implementations, include New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Amsterdam and Dubai to name just a few.
In a statement, Hyundai said, “Until now, autonomous driving has been demonstrated only on selected sections of Korean domestic roads and at a limited speed, this is the first time autonomous vehicles have operated on public highways at 110km/h, the maximum speed allowed by law on Korean highways”.
All the vehicles in the trial operated via 5G network, with Hyundai saying that once the vehicles were in autonomous mode, “the vehicles moved in response to the natural flow of traffic, executed lane changes, overtaking manoeuvres and navigated toll gates using Hi-pass, South-Korea’s wireless expressway payment system”.
What about tunnels? According to Hyundai, it fitted the Nexo with additional sensors that could pinpoint its position on a map and maintain it even when the GPS signal was lost when travelling through a tunnel. Indeed a number of additional sensors, cameras and Lidar were fitted to the Nexo.
