Hyundai’s new EV manufacturing unit is teeming with robots — and wariness in regards to 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 massive because the hulking robots that assist construct its automobiles.

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 Class 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. toes of house. One constructing homes a $4 billion battery plant, a joint operation with South Korea’s LG Vitality Answer, 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 world market. It’s all a part of a $21 billion funding in America between now and 2028, the overwhelming majority pledged in the course of the EV-friendly Biden administration.

Pulling into the manufacturing unit, I watch a conveyor carry freshly painted automobiles throughout a windowed bridge. It’s designed to let drivers on Interstate 16 see the fruits of a plant that may finally produce 500,000 EVs and hybrids a 12 months — greater than Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory, with its 375,000-car capability. Georgians may 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 lots 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 contemporary 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 additional time or advantages. Meaning using comparatively fewer people.

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

These AGVs are frequent in at present’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 automobiles’ wheels in robotic arms, hoist them off the bottom, and ferry automobiles the place they should go. I’ve visited automobile factories around the globe, and that is the primary I’ve seen the place an worker doesn’t have to begin automobiles 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 components.

“They’re delivering the precise components to the precise station on the proper time, so that you’re now not counting on individuals to make choices” or shedding time to errors, says Jerry Roach, senior supervisor of common meeting.

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

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

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

“It is a real-life manufacturing unit of the long run,” Roach says.

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

“I would like my individuals doing craftsmanship,” Roach says. “I need 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 need to do.”

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

Twenty-first-century carmaking additionally means the newest in inexperienced tech. The Metaplant targets acquiring one hundred pc of its vitality from renewable sources. Vans that haul components right here each day from a localized provide chain are powered by hydrogen gasoline 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.

Workers can park in almost 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 automobiles are shipped by rail somewhat than truck, trimming the plant’s carbon footprint.

Credit score the place credit score’s due

Hyundai hopes these trains will work additional time transport the 2026 Ioniq 9. Patrons will discover a spacious, extra reasonably priced foil to a Rivian R1S or Tesla Mannequin X, with 50 % extra cargo house behind its third row than Tesla. The sister automobile 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, totally 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 energetic noise cancellation.

Ioniq 9 prospects might give attention to a very compelling piece of tech: an onboard Tesla NACS connector opens the huge world of Tesla Supercharging to consumers. (The smaller Ioniq 5, which kicked off Georgia manufacturing in October, was the primary non-Tesla with a local 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 probably 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 consumers 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 symbolize 10 % of the value. However now the Trump administration is popping on electrified automobiles, the bulk in-built Republican-led states, in unprecedented, almost malicious trend. It’s kneecapping these credit, blocking public cash for chargers, and saddling EVs and hybrids with annual charges for street upkeep.

Hyundai had additionally taken its lumps underneath 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 world 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 proportion of US- and Canadian-made components from a piddling two % to 63 %, together with US-sourced batteries. For the Ioniq 9, the North American share sits at 60 %. Lastly, Hyundai might tout each American-made Ioniq fashions as being absolutely 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 automobile with out some share of imported components, 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 underneath stress to onshore their very own factories, the teachings are totally different. They need to take care of 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 every little thing by the ebook, a conclusion seems inescapable: They’re on their very own. Count on no assist from Washington, however somewhat 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.