This day was less packed than normal considering how much travel we needed to do to move back into our hotel in Seoul, but our visit to the Hyundai plant was interesting enough to make up for the time consumed by travel.
Before we went on the tour of the assembly line of their Ulsan plant- the largest automobile production plant in the world- we took a look at their company history museum. They went through a brief overview of how the company got started and what life was like for their workers in the early days. They showed us some old uniforms and pay slips, as well as notes from when their engineers were learning other languages to work with foreign companies.
They had a prototype car on display at the museum that used a hybrid between hydrogen and electric power and this blew my mind. I initially did not even know that hydrogen fuel cells were being integrated into mass produced vehicles, and the concept of already making hybrid engines with them was amazing to me. Apparently Hyundai had already been producing and using hydrogen fuel cell trucks especially for their plants, which was a great surprise for me. The advancements in automobile manufacturing were significantly higher than I had expected and this gave me a lot of hope for the future of sustainable driving. This is even more prevalent today with the increasing prices of gas, and I predict that the uncertainty of fossil fuels will make alternative vehicles much more appealing to consumers.
The plant itself was incredible to see and it was exactly like you might imagine in your head when you think car assembly line, if a little cooler. There was a long conveyor belt as you would assume, with car bodies being towed along different work stations so groups of workers could affix different parts to them. The cooler part, in my opinion, was that the workers were also on a conveyor belt with their tool stations that followed the progress of the car to keep pace. Once they were done with their task they were just whisked to the next car down the line. I had never thought of implementing this strategy before, but it was both effective and captivating to watch.
After this, we didn’t do much except make our way back to Seoul station and board another high speed train back to Seoul. We did stay at the same hotel as the first time we spent in Seoul, which was both good and bad. On the one hand it was familiar and the breakfast was amazing. On the other hand, it had some of the smallest bathrooms I had ever been in.
Thank you again for tuning in to the blog and I can’t wait to update you on what happens next!