Hyundai’s new EV factory is teeming with robots — and wariness about the future

Driving a 2026 Ioniq 9 SUV across the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant in Georgia can really feel like a victory lap for the South Korean automaker. Hyundai’s electrical flagship carves out room for 3 America-centric rows of seats, from a booming model whose EVs and hybrids already make up one in each 4 US gross sales.

Even higher, the Ioniq 9 and smaller Ioniq 5 are rising from a futuristic new manufacturing unit in America, giving Hyundai a defensible bulwark towards the tariffs and onshoring fervor of Donald Trump’s administration. As I watch these electrical SUVs roll off a surgically clear meeting line, Hyundai’s opportunistic timing looms as giant because the hulking robots that assist construct its vehicles.

A tour of the $7.6 billion manufacturing unit additionally underlines what number of automakers are plowing forward with long-laid EV plans, no matter Category 5 Washington winds that threaten to blow away Joe Biden-era assist for EV manufacturing, client tax credit, and public charging.

Seen from the air en path to Savannah, the Metaplant resembles a printed circuit board on a inexperienced background, blown as much as epic scale. Eleven low-slung, pale-green buildings dot 3,000 acres of Georgia countryside, with a complete 7.5 million sq. ft of house. One constructing homes a $4 billion battery plant, a joint operation with South Korea’s LG Vitality Resolution, that plans to start supplying cells for Ioniq fashions subsequent 12 months. The corporate is racing to open a second battery plant in Georgia, a roughly $5 billion joint operation with SK On. A forthcoming metal plant in Louisiana additional underscores Hyundai’s dedication to its largest international market. It’s all a part of a $21 billion investment in America between now and 2028, the overwhelming majority pledged throughout the EV-friendly Biden administration.

Pulling into the manufacturing unit, I watch a conveyor carry freshly painted vehicles throughout a windowed bridge. It’s designed to let drivers on Interstate 16 see the fruits of a plant that can finally produce 500,000 EVs and hybrids a 12 months — greater than Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory, with its 375,000-car capability. Georgians may additionally see their tax {dollars} at work. The publicly supported plant already employs 1,340 “Metapros,” sufficient to spice up the automaker’s annual native payroll to $497 million. Hyundai foresees an eventual 8,500 jobs on-site, and one other 7,000 satellite tv for pc jobs for native suppliers and companies.

That’s plenty of jobs. In contrast with the Detroit-area manufacturing unit the place I toiled within the Eighties, a miserable maelstrom of warmth, filth, poisonous chemical substances, and industrial accidents, this joint is like MOMA: a contemporary museum of producing artwork.

However the manufacturing unit additionally highlights a catch-22 of recent manufacturing, one which Trump’s financial advisors appear to miss, deliberately or in any other case: To have any likelihood of competing with China’s EV-and-battery juggernaut, factories should enlist rising armies of AI-enhanced robots that may probably work 24/7 and by no means demand time beyond regulation or advantages. Which means using comparatively fewer people.

On the manufacturing unit loading docks, Autonomous Guided Vehicles, or AGVs, busily unload elements from semitrucks. Roughly 300 of those robotic sleds roam the manufacturing unit with no tracks required, neatly avoiding employees or obstacles. AI informs the whole manufacturing unit operation, from procurement to logistics to manufacturing.

These AGVs are widespread in immediately’s factories, however I’ve by no means seen them at this scale, or a sure tag-team maneuver: A pair of sleds slide under completed Hyundais as they roll off the road. They squeeze the vehicles’ wheels in robotic arms, hoist them off the bottom, and ferry vehicles the place they should go. I’ve visited automotive factories around the globe, and that is the primary I’ve seen the place an worker doesn’t have to begin vehicles and drive them away.

Automated autos additionally carry each element to the meeting line for environment friendly “just-in-time” set up, no people required. That avoids losing cash and labor stockpiling enormous backlogs of elements.

“They’re delivering the best elements to the best station on the proper time, so that you’re not counting on individuals to make selections” or shedding time to errors, says Jerry Roach, senior supervisor of normal meeting.

Man’s greatest buddy does make an look. A pair of robotic canines named “Spot,” bred by the Hyundai-owned, Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics, scan and sniff out potential defects on automotive welds. These yellow-coated canines could quickly be joined by humanoid robots, the AI-driven “Atlas” models that Hyundai plans to deploy all through its factories sooner or later. The dexterous biped bots — whose means to cartwheel, breakdance, and barrel roll already outdoes most auto employees — seem outwardly pleasant, however will strike any sentient human as a possible Terminator of jobs. (Hyundai executives insist that’s not the case).

The welding store alone homes 475 industrial robots, piecing collectively the constructing blocks of a automotive chassis. A metal stamping plant is so spookily quiet that no ear safety is required, at the same time as robots stamp out roofs, fenders, and different physique panels in a whirling, difficult dance. As with many modern factories, there are strikingly few employees past the meeting line itself; I spot just a few dozen at work within the cavernous welding corridor.

Acquainted industrial robots — however not but humanoid Atlas robots — even set up cumbersome automotive doorways on the meeting line. Roach says that job is notoriously powerful for employees to handle with out probably damaging painted surfaces. Such “collaborative” robots have to be protected and dependable sufficient to function alongside people with out bodily separation required.

“This can be a real-life manufacturing unit of the long run,” Roach says.

These sorts of jobs, involving massively heavy lifting, repetitive duties, or computerized pace and accuracy, are “prime issues” to automate, Roach says. Different jobs require the tactile precision that solely human palms and imaginative and prescient present.

“I need my individuals doing craftsmanship,” Roach says. “I wish to pay individuals properly for the issues they do properly, and take away all of the stuff that’s tedious and boring, the roles individuals don’t wish to do.”

After all, some individuals may not thoughts tedious or heavy-lifting jobs that additionally pay a beneficiant residing wage. However there’s no going again to the times when it took many 1000’s of employees to maintain a manufacturing unit buzzing; Ford’s River Rouge complicated, designed by Albert Kahn, employed greater than 100,000 employees throughout World Warfare II.

Twenty-first-century carmaking additionally means the newest in inexperienced tech. The Metaplant targets acquiring one hundred pc of its power from renewable sources. Vehicles that haul elements right here every day from a localized provide chain are powered by hydrogen gas cells and produce zero tailpipe emissions. The 21-truck fleet is constructed by the Hyundai-owned XCIENT, the world’s first commercialized fuel-cell semis.

Staff can park in practically 1,900 areas beneath photo voltaic roofs, shielded from baking Georgia solar, which supplies as much as 5 % of the plant’s electrical energy. The majority of the manufacturing unit’s completed vehicles are shipped by rail reasonably than truck, trimming the plant’s carbon footprint.

Credit score the place credit score’s due

Hyundai hopes these trains will work time beyond regulation transport the 2026 Ioniq 9. Consumers will discover a spacious, extra inexpensive foil to a Rivian R1S or Tesla Mannequin X, with 50 % extra cargo house behind its third row than Tesla. The sister automotive to the critically acclaimed Kia EV9 is the costliest Hyundai but, ranging from $60,595 for a single-motor mannequin with a modest 215 horsepower. The cocooning, completely pleasant-driving SUV will get a 110 kilowatt-hour battery that provides a beneficiant 335 miles of driving vary, or a still-solid 311 to 320 miles for AWD variations. It’s full of helpful tech, together with a curling pair of conjoined 12.3-inch screens, 100-watt USB-C connectors, and lively noise cancellation.

Ioniq 9 prospects could concentrate on a very compelling piece of tech: an onboard Tesla NACS connector opens the large world of Tesla Supercharging to patrons. (The smaller Ioniq 5, which kicked off Georgia manufacturing in October, was the first non-Tesla with a native NACS plug). Like different EVs with superior architectures of 800 or extra volts, the Ioniq 9 doesn’t cost at its peak charges on Superchargers. However Hyundai nonetheless cites a 10-to-80-percent refill in 40 minutes. That drops to 24 minutes on essentially the most highly effective 350-kilowatt CCS chargers from Electrify America. Ioniq 9s will include free adapters to plug into CCS stations, opening entry to a complete 45,000 DC stalls in America.

Hyundai was additionally hoping to lure Ioniq patrons with a $7,500 client tax credit score, together with by switching Ioniq 5 manufacturing from South Korea to Georgia. For the Ioniq 9 I examined — a top-shelf, $75,000 Calligraphy AWD mannequin with 422 horsepower from a pair of electrical motors — that credit score would characterize 10 % of the worth. However now the Trump administration is popping on electrified vehicles, the bulk in-built Republican-led states, in unprecedented, practically malicious vogue. It’s kneecapping these credit, blocking public money for chargers, and saddling EVs and hybrids with annual charges for highway upkeep.

Hyundai had also taken its lumps under the Biden administration: The IRA made its imported EVs ineligible for tax credit, regardless of Hyundai’s pledge of billions of {dollars} in US funding. José Muñoz, Hyundai’s international president, made it clear the corporate felt blindsided and unfairly sidelined from credit.

The Metaplant was one reply, permitting Hyundai to shift Ioniq 5 manufacturing from South Korea. That enhances the mannequin’s share of US- and Canadian-made elements from a piddling two % to 63 %, together with US-sourced batteries. For the Ioniq 9, the North American share sits at 60 %. Lastly, Hyundai may tout each American-made Ioniq fashions as being totally eligible for $7,500 client tax credit, as executives did throughout my plant tour.

However in a bitter irony, a Hyundai that crossed oceans and moved mountains to jump-start US manufacturing of Hyundai, Kia, and luxurious Genesis EVs is about to be shut out of credit. Once more.

There are classes in there, someplace. For tariff proponents, the Metaplant could be a $7.6 billion lesson in actuality: No American manufacturing unit can screw collectively a single automotive with out some share of imported elements, together with from a China that holds a near-monopoly on a number of uncooked or processed battery supplies.

For automakers, together with (absolutely envious) Hyundai rivals now below stress to onshore their very own factories, the teachings are completely different. They need to cope with the Trump administration’s ever-changing tariff moods, in a enterprise that lives for long-term readability, regulatory consistency, and financial stability.

For each EV maker, together with a Hyundai Motor that seemingly did all the things by the guide, a conclusion seems inescapable: They’re on their very own. Count on no assist from Washington, however reasonably potential harm. The one potential technique is to roll up their sleeves, maintain their heads down, and keep away from additional kicks to the enamel.