Kia

Kia said in a release on Hyundai Motor Group's newsroom on Oct 16 that it began a remote-driving car-sharing pilot in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province, on Oct 15 and will run it to the end of the year, calling it the first test of remote driving in a real service in Korea. Employees of companies in the Second Pangyo Techno Valley book a PV5 Passenger van in an app; an operator in a control station drives the empty van over 4G and 5G networks to the requested spot, the user drives it and parks it, and the operator then drives it back to the depot. Kia supplies the vehicles and runs the project, autonomous-driving start-up SUM builds the remote-driving system, Mobiops operates the service and the Korea Road Traffic Authority reviews the legal side, with Gyeonggi Province and KT among the supporting bodies; the consortium uses three separate communication networks for redundancy. Kia, which obtained a Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport sandbox exemption for remote driving in April 2025 and ran road demonstrations in Jeju and Hwaseong, plans to widen the service in 2027 on the way to commercial launch; it gave no fleet size or pricing. For MEKAWIRE readers the pilot is the vehicle-side twin of the remote-operation model used in teleoperated humanoids, and the second Korean sandbox-backed robot deployment we have covered this month after the Robros humanoid approval.