Hyundai recently introduced a new technology called e-Corner in a video.
The system allows all four wheels to rotate up to 90 degrees, allowing for some cool tricks.
With e-Corner, a car can drive horizontally into a parking space or turn on the spot.
Have you ever parked in a parking space and seemingly lost the ability to parallel park? No matter how often you pull out and park, you always end up at an angle or on the curb. If that doesn’t apply to you, you’re in luck. For the rest of us, Hyundai has a solution. Perhaps. Someday.
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What can e-Corner do?
Hyundai Mobis, the automaker’s components division, has released a new video about a technology it is developing called e-Corner. The system allows all four wheels on a car to swivel up to 90 degrees – either together or independently – resulting in some pretty impressive capabilities.
One possible application is parking. The clip shows a Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric vehicle pulling up right next to an empty parking space, placing all four wheels perpendicular to the curb and simply rolling into it. No reversing or turning the steering wheel is necessary. Hyundai calls this “crabbing”.
E-mobility technology makes all of this possible. Most electric cars have a motor on one or both axles, but the motors can also be housed in the wheels, like an electric scooter or bicycle. This is rare in the automotive industry. Lordstown Motors, an electric pickup startup, may be the only company selling a vehicle with so-called hub motors in the US. But as Hyundai Mobis shows, this type of system allows for some fancy maneuvers that wouldn’t be possible with a normal vehicle.
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Hyundai also performed a “zero turn,” which is basically a U-turn without a U-turn. Again, the Ioniq 5 pivots its wheels outward, but this time the front and rear wheels rotate in opposite directions, allowing the Ioniq 5 to turn in place. Sounds like this could come in very handy in a tight parking lot.
Later in the video, the Ioniq 5 does a “pivot spin” where the front right wheel stays in place while the rear of the vehicle pivots outward. Interestingly, this is not an entirely new concept. As early as the 1930s, car manufacturers were experimenting with devices that could swing the rear of a car into a parking space:
The technology also enables diagonal driving by turning all four wheels 45 degrees. (It’s something the GMC Hummer EV pickup can do, too.) But of all the technologies shown in the clip, parallel parking and the 180-degree pirouette seem to be the most useful in the real world. Hyundai has not commented on whether the e-corner will ever come to market.
This article has been translated from English. You can find the original here.