Getting to Hyundai’s seven-storey facility in Singapore's Jurong industrial district can take up to an hour and a half, a long time in a dense city. But a customer that makes the drive will be greeted by an unusual sight for a car factory: A high-end Korean restaurant.
“Na Oh,” or “moving from inside out” in Korean, is Hyundai embracing its Korean heritage. Corey Lee, a San Francisco, Calif.-based three-star Michelin chef, consults on the restaurant’s menu, which changes every season. There’s also a vertical farm where visitors can plant a variety of seeds, the produce from which are used to supply the restaurant.
The two facilities are novel attractions in what Hyundai terms its Innovation Center, which the Korean automaker launched in November. Think of it as part factory, part farm, part research lab and, yes, part restaurant.
But much of the innovation at the Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center Singapore, unsurprisingly, focuses on cars.
A new kind of factory
Hyundai currently assembles the Ioniq 5 and 6, a battery EV, in Singapore for the domestic market, as well as the self-driving robotaxi variant bound for the U.S. The Singapore facility has the capacity to produce up to 30,000 vehicles annually.
Traditional car plants are massive sprawling complexes. Hyundai’s Singapore plant—while massive by the city’s standards—is more modest.
Building a car plant in a location where land is at a premium requires a different kind of factory layout. For one, the assembly at the Innovation Center is on the third floor. Robots assist engineers with almost every tasks, from transporting the parts to fitting them onto the chassis and even with quality inspections.
Alpesh Patel, chief innovation officer at HMGICS, thinks concepts used in Hyundai’s plant could end up being a model for other urban micro-factories. “Scarcity is equally applicable to a large city. Even in a very large country, the price of land is much higher than outside of town,” he explains.
Patel came to Hyundai after a stint with Ferrari, working as an aerodynamist for the Italian carmaker’s Formula One cars. The elite race-car circuit is regarded as the forefront of auto innovation—and the technology needed to make an F1 car is expensive.
But, eventually, that technology filters down to the mass market.
“The cost of computing power is significantly lower than it used to be when I was in F1. We can start doing more and more things,” he says, like finding pain points on the shop floor.
Why Singapore?
Hyundai’s executive chair, Euisun Chung, pushed to have the innovation center based outside of the company’s home base of South Korea to help inspire new ways of doing things.
Singapore was the top candidate for this 700 billion won ($505 million) project, due to its good infrastructure, supportive government, and talent according to Patel. But importantly, the smaller market size gives Hyundai room to experiment with new ways of doing things.
The Southeast Asian city is not a large car market compared to its neighbors. Just over 30,000 passenger cars were sold in Singapore last year; Malaysia, just next door, sold almost 720,000 passenger cars, more than 10 times higher. (Population-wise, Malaysia is six times larger than Singapore)
Hyundai has room to grow in Singapore’s (small) car market. Hyundai ranked 8th in the top ten car brands sold in Singapore last year, and its EV sales trail China’s BYD, Tesla and BMW.
Patel thinks that a facility like Hyundai’s Innovation Center can eventually be used for final assembly, allowing for more customization according to a location, and perhaps even a customer’s tastes.
“If we want to be able to produce the right personalized vehicles for the right population mix, then we need to bring manufacturing activity closer to the urban environment,” he says.
