A 12-man team at the Irvine headquarters of Kia Motors America Inc. is a key part of a global engineering and development effort to bring an autonomous vehicle to the market by 2030.
The technology and market strategy has been crafted by Chief Technology Strategist Henry Bzeih, who oversees the connected car and technology planning division at the North American unit of parent Kia Motors Corp. in Seoul.
Bzeih (pronounced Be-zay) works with Kia engineers at the company’s design centers in Irvine, South Korea, Detroit, and Frankfurt, Germany, to implement the automaker’s newly launched Drive Wise platform of advanced driver-assistance systems and intelligent safety features.
Several key aspects of the technology were developed, tested and adopted by companies across various industries in California, evolving from the consumer electronics market to the automotive sector.
OC Voice
“We provide that voice—we tell our Korean engineers in our R&D center there and various parts of the world, ‘This is what’s happening here,”’ Bzeih said. “We keep our eyes on the trends, what’s happening, not only from [an] auto [perspective but] from a technology perspective.”
The local unit, which employs 316 for sales, marketing and administrative duties, plays a key function in planning the product road map and assessing the final costs for the consumer of any vehicles destined for the North American market. It’s a challenging balance, considering development cycles typically are three to four years in the auto sector, compared with six months to a year in consumer electronics.
“At the end of the day, we need to know that the vehicle needs to get to the customer at a very specified price,” he said.
Kia took the opportunity of last month’s CES show to detail the autonomous driving technology, showcasing features such as autonomous parking and pickup, traffic jam assist, highway lane shifting, urban navigation, safe distance monitoring, and an emergency stop system, on the bustling showroom floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
The Drive Wise platform incorporates radar, camera technology, GPS and LIDAR—or light detection and ranging—that creates 3-D geospatial information, essentially high-resolution mapping with various applications, including storm surge modeling, shoreline surveys and search-and-rescue missions, among others.
“Having the ability to have high-definition maps within the vehicle is very important, but really the most important part is the software development, the software code that has to take all this information from various inputs and make sense out of it and send commands to the powertrain, the brakes, the steering, to work in unison to make sure we’re doing this in a safe manner,” Bzeih said.
Some of the features are smarter versions of previous technology Kia first introduced in 2012 on the full-size luxury model K900.
Kia last month was granted a license in Nevada to operate its autonomous concept vehicle on limited-access highways and will test drive the model throughout the year, according to Bzeih. A driver will have to be at the wheel, which is similar to California laws on the emerging technology.
Kia in 1994 established its U.S. headquarters and sales operation in Irvine. The automaker in 2008 moved to its current location at 111 Peters Canyon Road near the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway and Jamboree Road.
Its 239,000-square-foot headquarters on the 22-acre campus houses sales, marketing, consumer affairs, technical service, research, development, product planning and administrative personnel. An adjacent 65,000-square-foot design studio, which employs auto designers, engineers and model makers, developed the original design of Kia’s Soul utility vehicle.
The U.S. market last year was one of the few bright spots for Kia as the local unit posted record sales of 625,818 vehicles, up 7.9% from 2014. Kia Motors’ 2015 sales were nearly unchanged at 3 million vehicles from the prior year, missing its target of 3.15 million units.
Kia was one of more than 115 automotive-related companies exhibiting at CES, the world’s largest annual tech trade show, which was expected to draw some 170,000 attendees at this year’s event.
The show has really evolved in the last few years from a mobile device and TV showcase to a comprehensive consumer market event that includes automakers, the healthcare industry, apparel makers and the fitness sector, among others.
“It’s amazing how this is turning around to become the platform for auto tech,” said Bzeih, a Detroit native who was “born into the industry.”
“Samsung and Panasonic, even these guys within their own exhibits are starting to do more automotive.”
Kia’s sister company, Hyundai Motor America in Fountain Valley, demonstrated the Hyundai Virtual Guide app, the company’s first foray into augmented reality that features 82 how-to videos, more than 50 informational guides, and six 3-D overlay images that appear when users scan certain areas of the vehicle. The local unit first exhibited the technology in late November at the Connected Car Expo, a new offshoot that precedes the L.A. Auto Show.
Other Brands
Mason, Ohio-based Mitsubishi Electric Automotive America Inc., a sister company of Mitsubishi Motors North America Inc. in Cypress, unveiled its Emirai 3 xDAS concept vehicle with driver-assistance technology, as well as its Android-based FLEXConnect vehicle infotainment system.
Irvine-based chipmaker Broadcom Corp., which is set to be acquired for $37 billion by Avago Technologies Inc. in Singapore, used CES to tout a potential new application for auto customers. The company outfitted a small prototype hatchback with its Ethernet connectivity, allowing the driver to view video around the entire vehicle.
“If you were driving, instead of seeing just what’s behind you, you can see in all directions,” said Broadcom product spokesman Russ Castronovo during a demonstration at the company’s private booth at CES. “Those features are pretty important for safety.”
