Hyundai’s Wild Crab-Driving Tech Is Almost Ready—And Kia Could Be First To Use It

“I think we need to put that into production,” Kia design chief Karim Habib told InsideEVs.
Smushed up against a tennis court-sized pen at CES, the splashy annual tech expo in Las Vegas, a couple hundred of us watched on gleefully as an electric car called the Hyundai Mobion scampered sideways like a crab, drove in a perfect diagonal and pirouetted in place.

Each new party trick—made possible by four wheels that can rotate up to 90 degrees and spin independently—elicited audible gasps from onlookers accustomed to seeing cars move in just two boring directions: forward and reverse. Those days are over, my friends.

The most astonishing part of it all wasn’t that this technology merely exists, but rather that it’s almost ready for prime time.

Hyundai Mobis, the automaker’s supplier arm that created the Mobion concept, aims to complete the development of its dazzling e-Corner system by 2025, a company executive told InsideEVs. Kia, another firm under the Hyundai Motor Group umbrella, is eager to deploy the tech in its future autonomous delivery vehicles. So it may not be all that long before an electric Kia drops off a package in your driveway, does an about-face and continues on its merry way.

That’s the idea, anyway.

“I think we need to put that into production,” Kia design chief Karim Habib told InsideEVs in an interview.