The Expert Podcast

This news kind of flew under the radar but this is a really big deal in terms of what's going on with the electric vehicle market. Hyundai, one of the largest and fastest growing vehicle manufacturers, has shut down its gas engine development team permanently to go all electric. Its internal combustion engine development team is closed. For 40 years the automaker has been developing internal combustion engines but no more. They do have some engines obviously that are still in development but these are not going to be improved, redeveloped or redone.

Hyundai had 12,000 people working on engines but they're now being transferred to EV power train development. This is a big deal. This is a major automotive company basically saying we're not doing gas engines anymore. Up until recently they were kind of a little bit lackluster on fully committing but now they are completely off the deal of gas engines.

So even though it's kind of an under the radar story you may not read about it and the effects of this may not be realized for three four more years, they're still going to sell gas vehicles for the next several years. But any type of engine development needs constant upgrading and updating of the technology and if they're closing down engine development that means that whatever engines are currently in production they're going to continue to make those and use those in vehicles but after a few years you won't be able to use them anymore because they'll be outdated and they'll need new technology to keep them even usable in current year vehicles.

Everything is going to be electric with Hyundai and this is kind of a canary in a coal mine for future development of electric vehicles in the marketplace.