Hyundai $HYUD (-1.5%) to launch an AI-powered EV next year to keep pace in China

Hyundai Motor, in collaboration with its Chinese partner Haomo, will launch its first electric vehicle with generative artificial intelligence on the Chinese market next year.

"We are working to load software from Haomo, a local autonomous driving software company, into the electric vehicle that will be launched in the Chinese market next year," said a Hyundai Motor official. "The level of autonomous driving is somewhere between 2 and 2.5."

On a scale of autonomous driving that ranges from 0 to 5, level 2 refers to partial automation of driving, as the vehicle can control steering as well as acceleration and braking. Tesla's Autopilot would fall under Level 2 autonomous driving. Level 3 self-driving vehicles are able to recognize circumstances and make decisions on their own, such as accelerating past a slow-moving vehicle. Both level 2 and level 3 require human intervention.

Haomo unveiled its DriveGPT in April last year, taking inspiration from OpenAI's world-famous ChatGPT. The Chinese company explained that the generative AI model can continuously optimize the real-time decision-making ability of autonomous vehicles on the road by bringing in data about situations in which human drivers take control of the vehicle.

According to Haomo, DriveGPT has already been used in around 20 models. The Chinese self-driving car startup received 14 million dollars in Series B funding in February this year.

China is one of the frontrunners in the introduction of electric vehicles. Last year, 37 percent of new vehicles sold in China were electric vehicles. It is expected that the share of electric vehicles will exceed 50 percent this year.