Olabisi Boyle, vice president of product planning and mobility strategy at Hyundai Motor North America, has seen plenty of change during her years in the industry. Before joining Hyundai in August, Boyle was vice president of connected commerce at Visa, where one of her roles was to enlarge in-car payment technologies. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How long do you think that it will take before EV becomes the standard?
A: Hyundai has made significant investments on our trip to electrification leadership. We plan to present about 12 battery electric versions by 2025. The overall group will have 23 eco-friendly vehicles worldwide and one million vehicles EV from 2025. And we would like to fully electrify the car lineup and accounts for about 10 percent of the EV market by 2040.
Q: In CES you discussed the Urban Airport in the UK. Would you speak a bit about self flying and driving cars and the Urban Airport?
A: There is what we like to call”urban atmosphere mobility vehicles” instead of flying cars. We’ve got a joint venture with Aptiv named Motional and we began testing fully driverless systems in 2020. Our vision for future cities also comprises these things called”purpose vehicles.” All these are autonomous vehicles which may be used for freight, people, too ride-hailing with (fully) autonomous driving. Where it gets into the urban liberty and the way in which they interact is that we wish to have, going into the near future, multi-modal solutions for individuals. So you can come into a”vertiport” (a kind of airport where aircraft land and take off vertically) on your urban air mobility vehicle, land there, and then take these purpose-built vehicles into a different place, and then take it then from there into an e-bike or an e-scooter. We’ve got this vision for urban air mobility that’s looking to commercialize these aircraft by 2028.
Q: How does robotics and Hyundai’s acquisition of a vast majority stake in the robot-maker Boston Dynamics play in to this?
A: We want to own progress for humankind and become a wise mobility company. But we’re also working on all kinds of software for robotics. So it features wearable robotics engineering in our gathering plants to aid with individuals that have to do repetitive tasks, wearable robots to the elderly and people who have partial disability, after which robotics that we are growing for our urban mobility vehicles which could use robotics to function in off-road terrain.
Q: How are you adapting to this whole car buying experience going electronic?
A: We’re working with our dealers to guarantee all our traders have electronic retail options out there. We’ve seen our online transactions reach almost 10% of our entire quantity. It’s going to be something that continues and also develops. Post pandemic, post vaccine.