Automobiles played a very important role in the current economic state of South Korea, and today we visited Hyundai Asan. Hyundai Asan is one of their I believe 15 plants around the world, and different plants make different types of vehicles. I’m not sure of every type of car this plant makes, but a couple are the Sonata and Azera.

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures at any point during this tour, but it was an amazing experience. All of the cars are made pretty much completely by robots. Walking through the factory and watching many robots work together to create each piece of the car was fascinating. There was one machine, our guide explained, that is used to put many pieces together to create the body of the car. This machine is very expensive as she said it is worth $2.5 billion.

After the Hyundai Asan, we visited TK Elevators. We stared with an introductory presentation about safety and what to expect on our tour. This facility was awesome. They had a golf simulator that brought a ball up on a tee from the ground after every time you hit, and before our actual tour, they allowed us to test it out.

We were then split into groups, and my group first went to the safety training area. At this area, there were two things we were able to try, one was a drop into a foam pit and the other was being suspended in the air in a harness. I’m not exactly sure what the purpose of the drop was, but I think it was to show what happens when you fall in a harness and how the safety features work. I did the drop and it kind of hurt but I was fine right after it.

After the safety area, we walked through the factory and saw the assembly lines making the different components of the elevators. Lastly, we went to a tower they have outside of there building that is used to show their elevators. At the top they had the motors showing for the elevators that we were using.

Today was a very fun and interesting day, and I was very happy with both tours.