It starts with a sentence. “Starting autonomous driving.” Then the steering wheel turns on its own. On a weekday evening near Maebong Station in Gangnam, Seoul, a self-driving taxi called the Seoul Autonomous Vehicle pulled into traffic with a manager in the driver’s seat and his hands off the wheel, adjusting its speed to the signals and keeping its distance from the car ahead. Aju Press rode along and reported the drive on October 17.
The car is based on the Kia EV6, and its senses live in a modular platform Kakao Mobility calls AV-Kit: three LiDAR units, five radar units and seven cameras watching nearby vehicles, pedestrians and road conditions. From the back seat, passengers follow along on an AVV display – Autonomous Vehicle Visualizer – showing real-time 3D graphics of what the car sees around it. You are not just riding in the experiment. You can watch the experiment think.
Child zones at 80 percent, tunnels without GPS
The 20 to 30 minute drive around Maebong Station covered turns, merging traffic, tunnels and the hardest test on the route: child safety zones. Since August, Kakao Mobility has expanded the vehicle’s operating range to include child safety zones and other areas built around vulnerable road users. Entering one triggers an announcement – “You are entering a child safety zone” – and a rule set with no ambiguity. The car slows to 80 percent of the speed limit and limits sudden acceleration. Where the limit is 30 km/h, the taxi runs at a maximum of 24 km/h.
Then came the Maebong Tunnel, where GPS signals fade. In a tunnel, a self-driving car cannot lean on satellite position; its sensors have to carry navigation and awareness alone. The taxi adjusted speed and position as traffic merged from adjacent lanes, and it came through without the manager needing to take the wheel. Boring, in the best possible way. Tunnel competence is unglamorous and absolutely necessary in a city stitched together by them.
Responsibility, for now, still sits with a person. Under the current arrangement in these zones, the manager in the driver’s seat remains the driver in the eyes of the rules, even when his hands are off the wheel. That is the legal reality of Level 3-era operations everywhere: the technology may drive, but a human carries the liability.
Learning the whole city, not just the easy parts
The destination is a Level 4 service with no driver intervention. Kakao Mobility says it is building the technology for exactly that, using end-to-end driving AI trained on the situations the car actually meets, including emergencies, and handling surprises through the vehicle and control systems themselves. Kakao is not chasing that destination alone: in Europe, Mercedes and NVIDIA are aiming for Level 4 robolimousines built on the same staged logic of assistance first, autonomy when it is proven.
That phrase – trained on the situations the car actually meets – is the heart of it. A self-driving system does not get safer by avoiding hard places. It gets safer by meeting them, recording them and learning them, under supervision, at 80 percent speed, one child zone and one dark tunnel at a time. Gangnam’s mix of dense traffic, protected zones and underground stretches is not an obstacle to that process. It is the curriculum.
What it means for riders, cities and investors
For riders, the most persuasive detail is not the technology list. It is the behaviour. A taxi that announces a child zone out loud, slows itself before anyone asks, and explains in 3D graphics what it can see is teaching passengers how to trust it. Trust, not novelty, is what turns a demonstration into a habit.
For cities, Seoul is running the same experiment as San Francisco and Phoenix, but in its own order: expand the map into the sensitive areas early, with strict rules inside them, rather than walling them off. Compare how cautiously airport access is being added elsewhere – Waymo’s careful airport rollouts show the same staged logic on another continent. Stage by stage, the driverless map grows by permission and by proof.
For investors, Kakao Mobility is assembling the full stack a robotaxi business needs: the ride-hailing platform, the vehicle kit, the dispatch know-how and now supervised operations in one of the densest districts in Asia. If Level 4 approval follows the same staged path, the company will not need to buy its way into the market. It will already be driving in it.
One more detail from the ride stays with you. When the announcement sounds – “You are entering a child safety zone” – the car is not performing caution for the cameras. It is narrating its own rulebook, out loud, to the people trusting it with their evening. That may be the real product on trial in Gangnam: not a car that drives itself, but a car that can explain, in real time, why it deserves to.
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