HMG Presents Smart City Concept

During the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Hyundai Motor Group (HMG) shared the future vision for its three automotive brands – Hyundai, Kia Corp, and Genesis. Much of this surrounded an ecosystem of mobility, with personal and public modes of transportation, purpose-built vehicles (PBVs), and even personal urban aircrafts with their advanced air mobility (AAM) division, Supernal . Now, HMG presents a new vision for the world. At the 2022 World Cities Summit in Singapore, the automotive group presented the HMG Smart City master model, a design concept for smart cities where humans work in harmony with technology and nature.

“The HMG Smart City master model is our vision for a human-centered city that will revitalize urban communities. In the future smart cities, our ambition is for humankind to live with nature while embracing technology. Our air and ground mobility solutions will redefine urban boundaries, connect people in meaningful ways, and revitalize cities…We will continue to work with governments around the globe to bring our smart city vision to reality, while rapidly advancing capabilities in future mobility solutions.” – Hyundai Motor Group President and Chief Innovation Officer, Youngcho Chi

Design

Mirroring nature, the design concept is to build the Smart City with a honeycomb pattern, hexagonal-shaped with two layers – a human-centered surface layer, and a function-centered layer underground. Infrastructure was a big thing discussed during 2022 CES. Above ground, the city is meant to respect and encompass nature, with buildings encircling nature, such as public parks and forests, that will remain in the center of the city, minimizing the impact of industrial advancements. Split into three sections by population density to ensure the green center isn’t affected too much, with city landmarks in the high-density area, security infrastructure located in the medium density area, and the least amount of population density closest to nature.

Green

Aiming for an eco-friendly future, the HMG Smart City concept envisions a sustainable green city where natural areas are preserved, especially within the green center of the city. Featuring recreational forests, parks, and a reservoir to provide fresh, clean water for the city, the city will become a huge cornerstone for HMG’s goal of reaching carbon neutrality. This doesn’t necessarily mean the automotive group will have zero carbon emissions but achieve a balance of carbon industrial emissions and carbon reduction via natural processes, such as trees turning CO2 into oxygen. In fact, the city’s primary power source will be hydrogen, a naturally occurring byproduct of electrolysis, a method involving water and electricity.

Mobility

The main method of travel around these Smart Cities will be AAM vehicles, such as the eVTOL aircraft concept by HMG and Uber, that will take off and land via a series of Hub 2.0 towers with AAM ports at the top of the building. This is a lot like subways and trains taking people to stations near their place of work or destination, but more focused on residential and office areas. PBVs and robotaxis will also become more prevalent as HMG continues to invest in startups and R&D for autonomous driving technology and works towards the commercialization of robotaxis in 2023 and urban aircrafts to be commercialized in 2028. It’s starting to sound a lot more like Back to the Future II , every day. Want to keep up on all Kia and HMG are working on? Follow along with us on Miami Lakes Automall social media for more information on the HMG Smart City.

Photo Source/Copyright: Kia Media

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