Kakao Mobility, Kia partner to develop autonomous PBVs and pilot in K…

Kakao Mobility and Kia have signed a strategic partnership to develop autonomous purpose-built vehicles (PBVs) and jointly operate autonomous ride services in Korea, with Kia supplying purpose-built vehicles and integration kits by year-end. The companies will co-develop remote driving, wireless charging, and vehicle-to-user communication technologies for commercial autonomous services. If you build autonomous driving software, Kakao and Kia just signalled that the bottleneck isn't the AI—it's the car. You now have a template: find a fleet operator with deployment rights and a carmaker without autonomous customers, then integrate. Korea becomes the testbed for this model before global scaling.