South Korea’s auto giant Hyundai Motor Group is stepping up efforts to secure PhD-level talents from top-ranked universities overseas in preparation for a full-scale operation of a new smart factory around 2025.

According to multiple industry sources on Monday, Hyundai Motor Co. will hold a Hyundai Vision Conference 2023 for three days from Aug. 7 to 9. Its target audience includes doctoral degree holders, those who are expected to obtain one, and postdoctoral researchers who all majored in key technology fields for future cars at leading overseas universities.

To this end, Hyundai Motor has held job fairs and one-on-one counseling sessions at the campuses of top U.S. public and private research universities since last month, including the Georgia Institute of Technology, Illinois Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California and Purdue University.

The upcoming conference, the second of its kind, following one last year, will be held on topics such as robotics, future air mobility (AAM), autonomous driving, eco-friendly cars (electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles), device intelligence (embedded artificial intelligence and quantum computing), and smart factories, a newly added topic.

Hyundai Motor Group is currently building new EV plants in Georgia, U.S. and Hwaseong and Ulsan, which are both south of Seoul, with an aim to operate them as smart factories.

In particular, the new EV plant, Metaplant America, in Georgia, which has an annual production capacity of 300,000 units, will begin mass production of electric vehicles in the third quarter of next year. HMGMA is the first smart factory to be built in the U.S. and will introduce massive innovative manufacturing technologies that apply robotics and artificial intelligence (AI).

In addition to holding the Vision Conference, Hyundai Motor is also preparing to recruit talents abroad. Recruitment categories include prior technology, autonomous driving, battery, cyber security, digital engineering, hydrogen fuel cell, power electronics, robotics and design technology. Recruitment related to smart factory technology is mainly overseen by affiliates such as Hyundai AutoEver Corp, an automobile internet company.

By Moon Gwang-min and Yoon Yeon-hae

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