Hyundai Says It Can Overtake Tesla FSD Within Five Years

Hyundai Motor Group believes it can catch and eventually overtake Tesla in autonomous driving within five years, but the company claims it is deliberately taking a slower path to get there.

According to the Korea JoongAng Daily, Hyundai is building its strategy around a self-driving system called Atria AI, which the company plans to bring to production vehicles in the second half of 2029.

Rather than rushing a system to market, Hyundai says it wants more time to collect driving data, study difficult scenarios and retrain its AI before a wider rollout.

“We believe Atria AI could move faster if we pushed with everything we have,” said Park Min-woo, head of Hyundai Motor Group’s Advanced Vehicle Platform Division and chief executive of 42dot, the group’s autonomous driving affiliate.

“But we made a strategic decision to slow down. Rushing into mass production now risks delivering a middling Level 2++ system, far short of our real target,” Park said.

Before Atria AI arrives, Hyundai is working with Nvidia on a Level 2++ system planned for the second half of 2028. The company says that level of automation is roughly comparable to Tesla’s current Full Self-Driving system.

Hyundai’s longer-term advantage, it argues, could come from scale.

The automaker sells about seven million vehicles each year across 190 markets, giving it the potential to collect large amounts of real-world driving data.

“Hyundai sells 7 million vehicles a year across 190 markets, which means we can accumulate data at scale and at this pace, we can overtake what our rivals have built in five years,” Park added.

“The competition in autonomous driving is no longer about the speed. It comes down to how much data you can gather, how fast you can learn from it and how quickly that translates into real products and services.”

Hyundai currently has about 40 vehicles collecting driving data around the clock. Its system is designed to pay particular attention to difficult situations such as construction zones, bad weather, sudden lane changes and poorly parked vehicles.

When the AI struggles with a situation, Hyundai says those cases can be flagged and fed back into the training system so the model can learn from them, which sounds exactly like what Tesla is doing.

The company’s 42dot unit is also developing a newer autonomous driving system based on a vision-language-action framework, which combines visual information, reasoning and vehicle behaviour.

Hyundai says 2027 will focus on improving driving, parking and active-safety features, while 2028 will be used to gather more edge-case data. The company plans to move toward safety certification in Korea, North America and Europe in 2029.

Tesla has spent years pushing its FSD system through frequent software updates and a large customer fleet. Hyundai’s strategy appears to be the opposite: move more slowly now, gather more data and try to close the gap later.