Kia Launches Drive Wise Sub-brand to Market Autonomous Tech

Drive Wise will drive partially-autonomous Kia’s by 2020, with completely autonomous vehicles on the road by 2030. Also unclear is whether it plans to have all of the features or just some of them on Kia vehicles by 2020.

“Although the first marketable fully-autonomous vehicle from Kia will not be available in the immediate future, the work our R&D teams are now doing to develop our range of Drive Wise technologies is already improving on-road safety and driver assistance”.

Kia has also been granted a licence to test autonomous vehicles in Nevada, and will invest $2 billion by 2018 to fast-track this development.

“Kia is undergoing a very promising and gradual process of introducing partially and fully autonomous technologies to its vehicles”, Tae-Won Lim, senior vice president, Central Advanced Research and Engineering Institute of Hyundai Motor Group, said in a statement.

In a day packed with news from auto manufacturers Toyota and Ford, Kia’s CES press conference topped off a red letter day for the automotive industry (a CNET anchor joked that CES had “become a vehicle show”) – and while CES newcomer Kia, unlike Ford, didn’t issue any drone-related software challenges, they did introduce their first foray into the world of automated driving with their sub-brand Drive WISE and safety security system ADAS, which will purportedly be fully implemented by 2030. Kia sees autonomous driving as beneficial for consumers by preventing accidents, reducing traffic, and reducing pollution. In the event that the road you’re on doesn’t have clear lane markings, PVF takes over.

Also at CES this year is Kia’s I-Cockpit display, which previews the company’s next-generation human-interface technologies, including gesture control and a fingerprint touchpad that automatically recognizes driver preferences such as radio and climate settings based on his or her fingerprint.

New HMI functions planned by Kia will also be marketed under the Drive Wise banner.

These vehicles will theoretically not need any user assistance whatsoever, and should be able to drive even without a user inside it. You would be able to “loan” a vehicle to a family member by sending it to their address with a smartphone app, for instance. “In 2015, Kia recorded its most successful year ever, and sold over”.