Hyundai Motor Group has pulled the wraps off Pleos Connect, its new in-vehicle infotainment platform.
The system is targeting 20 million Hyundai, Kia and Genesis vehicles by 2030.
The production-ready system made its public debut at a media event at UX Studio Seoul on April 29. It’s the mass-production version of a concept first shown at the Group’s Pleos 25 developer conference last year.
Its first commercial outing will be on the new Grandeur in South Korea this May, with a phased global rollout to follow — including the recently revealed Ioniq 3 in Europe.
Three things shape the whole thing: intuitiveness, safety, and openness.
The cockpit centres on two displays — a large central screen split into a driving information panel, an app screen, and a bottom bar for pinned shortcuts; and a slim driver-facing display showing speed, media, and turn-by-turn directions without pulling the driver’s eyes across the cabin.
Physical buttons on the steering wheel and beneath the central screen mean fewer reasons to prod the screen. A three-finger gesture lets drivers reposition or close apps on the fly. It’s less fiddly than it sounds.
Navigation has been reworked significantly. Big data from existing users informed a leaner screen layout, stripping out complex graphics in favour of simpler icons.
The interface is now modular — drivers can run navigation and another app side-by-side on the large display. Floating cards surface route details and estimated arrival times without cluttering the main view.
Then there’s Gleo AI, the LLM-powered voice assistant sitting at the system’s core. It handles multi-command inputs, responds to vague instructions like “find somewhere to eat near here,” and can identify which seat the speaker is in — useful for commands like “turn on my heated seat.”
Web search, vehicle control, climate settings, and manual look-ups are what it can do right now. Personalised services are planned as the platform matures.
The App Market sits on top of all this. YouTube, Spotify, and NAVER maps are already on board, with gaming and vehicle management services expected to follow via third-party partnerships.
Developers can build for the platform through the Pleos Playground API programme.
OTA updates are table stakes at this point, but Hyundai is making them central to the group’s switch towards software-defined vehicles — and, eventually, what it’s calling AI-defined vehicles.
