On the 30th, Hyundai Motor Group hosted the finals of the “2025 Autonomous Driving Challenge” at ‘Factorial Seongsu’ in Seongdong-gu, Seoul. This competition, aimed at university students, focused on ‘AI End-to-End (E2E) Autonomous Driving,’ surpassing rule-based autonomous driving to align with global research trends. Participants competed in a virtual city environment based on real road data from Hwaseong’s ‘K-City,’ tackling tasks such as driving stability, obstacle avoidance, and waypoint navigation.
The competition evolved from having teams complete missions individually to all teams driving simultaneously. Additionally, the development environment shifted from PC-based to one using the ‘NVIDIA Orin-X’ system-on-chip (SoC), enhancing the adaptability of E2E logic.
Hyundai Motor Group provided development funds and MORAI simulator licenses to the teams, and mentoring from researchers at Hyundai, Kia, and 42dot, enhancing their algorithm development. In the preliminaries held on the 29th, the top 6 teams from the first round competed, with ▲KAIST ▲UNIST ▲Chungbuk University ▲Hanyang University advancing to the finals. In the finals, teams had to pass arbitrary waypoints within the driving course. Final rankings were determined by combining completion scores and penalties. The honor of winning the 2025 Autonomous Driving Challenge’s second competition was claimed by the UNIST team.
The winning team received a prize of 30 million won and an opportunity to visit China to learn about autonomous driving trends. The second-place team received 20 million won, the third-place 10 million won, the fourth-place 5 million won, and the fifth and sixth teams received 3 million each. The top two teams were also granted direct entry into the document-screening round for research positions at Hyundai, Kia, and 42dot’s autonomous driving group.
Hyundai’s R&D Planning and Coordination Office Director, Lim Eul-gyo, stated, “The 2025 Autonomous Driving Challenge is a meaningful platform for domestic university researchers to broaden their scope in the ‘AI End-to-End Autonomous Driving’ field. We hope that through the challenge, academia in Korea grows in step with global research trends and leads the advancement of future autonomous driving technologies.”