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Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology just scored a major win — and this time, the praise is coming from inside a rival automaker.
According to a report from The Elec, Hyundai Motor recently conducted an internal evaluation of several autonomous driving systems, and Tesla’s FSD (Supervised) came out far ahead of the competition. In Hyundai’s testing, Tesla’s autonomous driving stack scored an impressive 90 out of 100 for technological sophistication, easily topping Huawei, Mobileye, Momenta, and even Hyundai’s own in-house system.
The results paint a grim picture for Hyundai’s internally developed Atria AI, which managed just 25 out of 100 in the same evaluation. The test, conducted by Hyundai’s Advanced Vehicle Platform (AVP) division, used the Waymo Open Dataset as a benchmark — a widely respected dataset in the autonomous driving space.
For comparison, Huawei scored 70, while both Mobileye and Momenta landed at 50. Tesla wasn’t just the leader — it was in a different league altogether.
Atria AI has been under development for roughly a year at 42dot, Hyundai Motor’s autonomous driving subsidiary. But recent leadership changes appear to be accelerating a strategic rethink. Earlier this month, Hyundai appointed Minwoo Park as head of its AVP division and CEO of 42dot. Park previously spent nine years at Nvidia, which recently unveiled its own autonomous driving platform, Alpamayo.
Sources cited by The Elec say some Atria AI researchers have already been reassigned to projects working on Nvidia’s Alpamayo models. Unlike Atria AI, which reportedly relies partially on convolutional neural networks and roll-based control logic, Alpamayo is said to feature over 10 billion parameters and training data spanning more than 2,500 cities.
While Hyundai’s work with Alpamayo is still in early stages, insiders suggest the automaker could eventually abandon Atria AI entirely or retain the branding while swapping in Nvidia’s technology underneath.
Tesla’s strong showing isn’t exactly surprising. The company’s latest public Full Self-Driving builds already demonstrate enough confidence to allow drivers to text behind the wheel under certain conditions. Behind the scenes, Tesla’s internal models are even further ahead, having recently powered fully unsupervised Robotaxi rides in Austin with no driver or safety monitor onboard.
Hyundai’s internal scores quietly confirm what many in the industry already suspect: Tesla’s camera-only autonomous driving stack is currently setting the pace, and competitors are taking notes.
