Hyundai Motor, Kia win bronze at Cannes Lions for road safety tech campaign

Hyundai Motor and Kia announced Sunday that their Vision Pulse campaign won a bronze Lion in the Technology Design category at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Cannes Lions, the advertising industry's most prestigious festival, has been held in Cannes, France, since 1954. This year's 73rd edition drew more than 20,000 entries from 92 countries.

The award-winning Vision Pulse campaign is a video documenting Hyundai Motor and Kia's efforts to protect children's safety on their way to school by piloting the Vision Pulse technology on kindergarten shuttle buses.

Vision Pulse is an advanced driving safety technology that uses Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) radio waves to pinpoint the real-time location of obstacles around a vehicle, assisting the driver.

When Vision Pulse is installed in a vehicle, a UWB module emits radio signals. If nearby vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles or pedestrians also carry UWB signal-emitting modules, the two modules measure the time it takes to exchange signals with each other. The company says the system can warn the driver when a collision is anticipated, significantly improving safety.

Because UWB uses gigahertz-wide ultra-wideband radio frequencies, it experiences little interference from other signals and excels at diffraction — the phenomenon in which waves propagate around obstacles or through narrow gaps into shadowed areas — and penetration. Those properties allow the technology to determine the precise location of objects within a roughly 100-meter radius to within a 10-centimeter margin of error, even at busy urban intersections crowded with obstacles.

A separate UWB module can be installed in a vehicle to use Vision Pulse, but vehicles equipped with Digital Key 2 already have the module built in, meaning the technology can potentially be used without additional hardware.

In the campaign video, Hyundai Motor and Kia presented the idea of designing UWB modules for children in the form of guardian-character keyrings that attach to a school bag for easy carrying. The keyring also doubles as a sleep mood light, so children naturally plug it in to charge while switching on the nightlight before bed — a convenience feature built into the design.

The Cannes Lions jury praised Vision Pulse for securing cost efficiency and scalability through its integration with the existing Digital Key ecosystem, and for applying advanced technology to solve a real-world safety problem.

"Our sincerity in using advanced technology combined with creativity to solve social problems is translating into consecutive wins at international advertising festivals," a Hyundai Motor and Kia official said. "We will continue working to let more people know that our technology is aimed at a better life for humanity."

The Vision Pulse technology campaign had already drawn wide attention in the advertising world in April, winning two merit awards at the One Show and a bronze at Spikes Asia — both considered among the world's most prestigious advertising festivals.

At the One Show, the campaign took merit awards in the Intellectual Property & Product Design category and the Experimentation & R&D category. At Spikes Asia, it received a bronze in the Innovation category.

Meanwhile, Hyundai Motor and Kia have been running a pilot project since 2025 applying Vision Pulse technology to the production line at Kia's Purpose Built Vehicle (PBV) conversion center in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, to prevent collisions between forklifts and workers.

Hyundai Motor also signed an MOU with the Busan Port Authority in October last year and plans to verify the technology through a pilot project at Busan Port terminals and the surrounding logistics complex, focusing on preventing collisions between industrial mobility equipment and workers.