Hyundai builds electric vehicle facility in Singapore

South Korean carmaker Hyundai Motor is building a S$400mn ($294mn) research and development centre in Singapore, which will house the city-state's first electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing facility.

The facility may produce up to 30,000 vehicles/yr by 2025, Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong said. Construction of the entire project is expected to be completed by the end of 2022.

Singapore has no auto manufacturing capacity, having given up on car assembly decades ago when "production technologies changed and car assembly on a small scale became no longer economically viable," Lee said.

But automotive activities are becoming viable again in Singapore. "EVs have a different supply chain, fewer mechanical parts and more electronics, which play to Singapore's strengths," he said.

Singapore has set a goal for all vehicles to run on cleaner energy by 2040 to meet its commitments under the Paris climate agreement. "This means that after 2030 we should see no new purchases of internal combustion engine vehicles," senior minister of state for communications and information Janil Puthucheary said earlier this year.

The centre will also explore new business concepts such as batteries as a service, which allows drivers to buy an EV without owning its battery and so lowers the starting price of such cars. Drivers will instead pay a monthly fee to use the batteries.

Hyundai Motor is targeting 1mn EV sales by 2025 under a plan to become one of the world's dominant automakers in the fast-growing segment. It accounted for 7.2pc of total global EV sales in the first five months of 2020, up from 5.4pc in the same period of 2019.

By Reena Nathan