Robots are everywhere in Hyundai’s Georgia plant, but they can’t do everything

What can get lost amid the metallic whirs are the hundreds of human hands that touch these cars as they’re ushered through Georgia’s largest and most high-tech automobile plant. And that human touch is something Hyundai leaders said will not — and cannot — change anytime soon.

“In most general assembly plants, you might find 30 robots,” said Brent Stubbs, the facility’s chief administrative officer. “Ours, you’re going to see over 300.”

“But,” he continued, “you also don’t realize there’s 500 people in this sea of technology.”

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

Some of those employees are holding tablets to supervise the work of their mechanical peers. Others still use elbow grease to finagle seat belts into position or ensure buttons properly snap into place.

Those jobs have only a lingering resemblance to the tasks auto factory workers used to perform for generations. Industry experts said the Hyundai factory offers a glimpse of what’s to come, both for car factories and other types of advanced manufacturing.

“Yes, the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs are being automated,” said Alex Shikany, executive vice president at the Association for Advancing Automation. “But they’re not desirable anymore.”

Hyundai’s multibillion-dollar factory near Savannah, which it calls its Metaplant, is the largest economic development project recruited to Georgia in state history. It also carries a large employment promise: 8,100 full-time human workers by 2031.

The Korean automaker has already exceeded its investment target for the factory, which is poised to undergo more expansions. Hyundai also ended 2025 with more than 3,800, according to compliance reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained through an open records request.

The targets were set in an incentive package negotiated by state and local leaders to woo Hyundai to Georgia, a deal estimated to be worth a record $2.1 billion. Those incentives also apply to an on-site battery factory, which recently began operation after being delayed after a high-profile immigration raid last year that strained international relations between the U.S. and South Korea.

The Hyundai campus is preparing for more automation, specifically the integration of Atlas humanoid robots in 2028. Jerald Roach, a top general assembly executive at the Metaplant, said the new technology isn’t a threat to the factory’s human workforce, which Hyundai calls “Meta Pros.”

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

Instead, he said the assembly lines highlight the tasks ripe for automation and those only people can perform.

“That sense of feel is very hard to teach automation,” Roach said. “Without the craftsmanship that the Meta Pros on this line put into the vehicle, we could not be successful.”

Why are robots in car factories?

Robots have played a pivotal role in building cars for about 50 years.

The auto industry was well-positioned to widely adopt automation because of the scale, mundanity and strain of many aspects of manufacturing. That meant most large-scale robotic advancements were made with vehicle-building tasks in mind, said Steven Ferguson, deputy director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute.

“Heavy lifting, repetitive tasks, those are the things that robotics were built for,” said Ferguson, who is also managing director of Georgia Tech’s artificial intelligence in manufacturing initiative. “Humans weren’t made to stand there and do a repetitive task eight hours a day, five days a week.”

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

For decades, every hundred-pound car door needed two people to lift it and more workers to fasten it in place. Each vehicle’s paint job required strict use of personal protective equipment. Regardless of how awkward the angle, every weld point was done by hand.

In the 1970s and 1980s, robotic arms began replacing those tasks, occupying entire assembly lines with minimal human involvement.

In 1985, there were more than 300,000 workers at U.S. auto assembly plants, according to federal data. That figure declined to a low of about 150,000 during the Great Recession. It has since rebounded to more than 280,000 as of last year.

More than half of all new robot orders in the U.S. are to serve car factories and their suppliers, according to data from the Association for Advancing Automation. Other sectors are slowly adding more robots to their operations, but nowhere near the scale of automakers.

“Auto companies wouldn’t be able to survive today without robotics,” said Kevin Ketels, an assistant professor of global supply chain management at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Other countries have spent the past few decades automating their car-building operations at an even faster clip. The U.S. ended 2024 with the eighth-densest footprint of industrial robots per human worker, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

Hyundai’s home country of Korea is leading the pack, nearly quadrupling America’s rate of robot deployment. Susanne Bieller, general secretary of the International Federation of Robotics, said Korean companies have built automation into their supply chains, which is visible across Coastal Georgia’s fast-growing network of part suppliers feeding the Hyundai plant.

Stubbs said Hyundai’s ambition is to be “the global leader in manufacturing innovation,” which includes its majority ownership of robotics company Boston Dynamics of robotic dog fame. The companies in January unveiled Atlas, a series of humanoid AI-powered robots intended to better mimic flexible movements.

“They’re not just cool to look at. They’re doing tasks,” Ferguson said on humanoid and canine machines. “And because they’re dynamic in their capabilities, they don’t just stay in one station to do an inspection. They can move around. They can do multiple tasks.”

Credit: Courtesy of Hyundai Motor Group

Credit: Courtesy of Hyundai Motor Group

The company is bringing that approach stateside, using the Metaplant as its first deployment of new automated technologies, including Atlas.

“In Georgia, it’s very good news that a plant is being developed with advanced technology,” Ketels said. “We can have more confidence that this will be a competitive enterprise, and it will be around for much longer.”

‘Flexibility is now paying off’

Automation has made strides over the past two decades, and Georgia is in a unique position to show that evolution.

It only requires driving about 250 miles west of Hyundai’s factory to the last car plant built in Georgia.

Kia, a corporate cousin of Hyundai, opened its West Point plant in 2009 and recently spent $200 million retrofitting it to incorporate electric vehicles and new technologies. But the factory wasn’t designed for the level of automation on display near Savannah.

“They’re both chasing the same things — efficiency, quality, production capacity,” Ferguson said. “But they’re going to take very different paths because the Metaplant got to start with a 15-year look back.”

Credit: Bloomberg

Credit: Bloomberg

Kia’s effort took about 10 months to add EVs to its production lines, which consist of physical conveyor belts rather than the Metaplant’s robot-propelled lines.

Hyundai took only two weeks to incorporate its first hybrid model, the Kia Sportage, into its lines.

“It’s really a matter of programming the new routes instead of tearing down conveyors,” Roach said. “This plant was built with that in mind from the beginning, and that flexibility is now paying off as we’re now launching hybrid vehicles and other models based on customer demand.”

Physical conveyor belts have been a staple of the auto industry since Ford’s Detroit factories in the 1910s. The adoption of robots called automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, to move car bodies and parts means “conveyance is going by the wayside,” Ferguson said.

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

The Metaplant’s first phase was designed to assemble up to six models, ranging across the Hyundai, Kia and Genesis brands. The hybrid Sportage joins the fully electric Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 9, with other models awaiting incorporation. That’s before Hyundai expands the Metaplant’s annual capacity to 500,000 vehicles.

Shikany said diversification and adoption of new technologies provide a competitive advantage to automakers. He said it’s understandable some would fear robots replacing jobs, conjuring up Midwestern fears of déjà vu with shuttered factories. But he said those empty plants were the result of falling behind the times and being outcompeted overseas.

“The jobs that went away weren’t because of robots and automation,” Shikany said of Detroit’s industrial decline in the 1980s and 1990s. “The plants closed, and all the jobs went away, so the real threat is companies going out of business because they can’t compete.”

Instill and upskill

Robots have to be designed and trained to work car factory lines. The same applies to human workers, especially as new technology joins them.

Georgia Quick Start, a state-funded workforce development program, operates the Hyundai Mobility Training Center on the Metaplant campus to prepare workers for the high-tech tasks required at the factory. Its curriculum is updated as new machines, such as the Atlas robots, are incorporated.

Ferguson said upskilling career auto workers is essential to prevent them from being left behind. He said the same is true of youth education and technical schools. The jobs robots replace are often the introductory positions filled with grunt work.

Credit: Photo courtesy of Georgia Quick Start

Credit: Photo courtesy of Georgia Quick Start

“The problem is it does remove one rung of a ladder in that trajectory toward advancing through job responsibilities,” he said. “So it’s incumbent on us in higher education and even the K-12 system to prepare students for a higher level of skill that’s needed to work with the robots and to operate alongside them.”

Stubbs said “there’s zero changes” to Hyundai’s job commitments to Georgia, saying that new technologies create their own spillover jobs managing those systems.

Roach said many of the tasks in the Metaplant can only be done by human hands. Of the litany of parts that comprise a car, many are soft, squishy and pliable. Machines need consistency to avoid errors.

“A lot of them are soft parts — hoses, wires, carpets and trim panels. They don’t necessarily always react the same way, and they require the unique skill set that people have,” Roach said. “I don’t see that going away.”

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

Some types of jobs are left behind, Stubbs said.

The milk man was replaced by grocery store convenience; knocker-uppers used to awaken people before alarm clocks; and the chimney sweep is a relic kept alive only by showings of “Mary Poppins.”

But Stubbs said some jobs are irreplaceable, others are created by new technologies, and the ones that get replaced by machines often aren’t ones people yearn to return.

“Do you remember in your life when a big hole was dug by shovels? No, because a piece of technology called a tractor came along,” Stubbs said. “Nobody drives by and sees tractors and goes, ‘I tell you what I miss, those good old days when human beings were doing that.’”

“That tool simply elevated what human beings could do,” he said.