Hyundai Motor, Kia employees build in-car app that syncs bedtime stories to drive time

Just as the car pulls into the driveway, the story reaches its ending. That is the premise behind an in-vehicle app that links a car's real-time driving data and passenger reactions to pace a children's audio story so it concludes precisely when the journey does — the grand-prize winner of a 24-hour in-house hackathon held by Hyundai Motor and Kia employees.

Hyundai Motor and Kia announced Monday that they held their first in-car app development hackathon, the "24H Code Race," from Thursday to Friday at Techone in Pangyo, Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province.

A hackathon is a timed development competition in which participants turn ideas into working services within a set period. The event drew not only research and development staff but also employees from non-technical roles, all of whom spent 24 hours building prototypes of apps designed for use inside a vehicle.

Hyundai Motor and Kia organized the competition to expand the app ecosystem for their next-generation infotainment system, Pleos Connect. The companies aim to build out an app marketplace that lets drivers select and use services of their choosing in the car, much like a smartphone.

Hyundai Motor Group began rolling out Pleos Connect with the new Grandeur in May and has set a target of installing the system in about 20 million Hyundai Motor, Kia and Genesis vehicles by 2030. The platform includes an open app marketplace and a voice assistant called Gleo AI, powered by a large language model.

Of more than 220 ideas submitted last month, 25 teams totaling about 100 employees cleared the preliminary screening to compete. Participants proposed services connecting cars to everyday life across categories including safety, healthcare, entertainment and gamification.

The development process made use of "vibe coding" with the companies' internal generative AI tools. In this method, developers describe desired features in plain language and let the AI generate the underlying code, rather than writing it line by line. Using this approach, participants brought their apps to a demonstrable state within the 24-hour window.

Teams went beyond pitching ideas on slides. Each also produced a one-minute short-form video showing their finished app in action, walking through the development process and highlighting its core features.

Entries were judged on four criteria: originality, customer value, marketability and completeness. A panel of internal executives and outside experts evaluated submissions through an online review and live presentation round, selecting one grand-prize winner and three excellence-award recipients.

The grand prize went to the SyncLab team for "TaleSync," an interactive audio service that connects a vehicle's real-time driving data with information about a child passenger's reactions, engineering the story's conclusion to land exactly when the car reaches its destination.

If the remaining drive time grows longer or shorter, the story's pacing adjusts accordingly. Judges praised the app for linking a vehicle's movement data to an entirely new category of content, rather than conventional music or video.

The three excellence awards went to "Baby Sleep Drive" by team Jaewoo GO, Appa GO; "Majung" by team WayU; and "Acxit" by team Memora. Hyundai Motor and Kia said they plan to identify the winning entries with the strongest real-world potential and review whether to deploy them in actual vehicles.

The event reflects a broader push by Hyundai Motor Group to expand AI adoption across the company. On Aug. 12, the group disclosed the results of its group-wide AI transformation efforts and said it is scaling up the application of generative AI across research and development, manufacturing and general operations.

"We were able to see the creative ideas and pioneering spirit of our employees, grounded in their on-the-ground experience and expertise," said Park Min-woo, head of Hyundai Motor and Kia's AVP division. "This hackathon will serve as the starting point for app services that transform the customer experience and for expanding the Pleos ecosystem."