Two of the world’s largest automakers are becoming closer friends, we learned this morning. Hyundai Motor Group and General Motors, which together sold 13.5 million cars last year, have decided to try and collaborate in a range of areas in the coming years, including vehicle design, technology development, and even supply chain sourcing.
GM is one of the world’s oldest and most established automakers and has a long legacy of clever engineering solutions, albeit one often hamstrung by corporate decision-making.
Meanwhile, GM was just a year from its 60th birthday when HMG got going, and while the Korean automaker was not taken particularly seriously in the US as a budget brand at launch, over the last 15 years its products have been class-leading, especially its electric vehicles.
With the agreement signed, the two companies say they will immediately start looking for opportunities to work together, including jointly developing and producing new passenger and commercial vehicles, new internal combustion engines, and also new electric powertrains, whether those be battery- or hydrogen-powered.
Why do you care? I never understand this argument as if companies can only work on one thing at a time. Hydrogen does have benefits over pure BEV and studying different designs can only increase industry knowledge and the number of solutions available even if they don’t ultimately succeed in the end. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea.
I care because we have a massive task of getting people to move to EVs and they keep going back and forth between tech while they continue to mass produce ICE. ICE has to go.
Nobody is going back and forth and EVs are rolling out every day. It’s not environmentally friendly to scrap 200+ million cars and replace them with EVs either. Hydrogen cars are green tech just as much as BEVs especially if someone lives somewhere where their power comes from coal or gas plant. The knowledge they learn from testing hydrogen vehicles has the potential of being used in other industries as well. Like what is the problem with more knowledge for the human race?