At the autonomous driving forum hosted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) on September 24, some debaters from the industry and academia requested a moratorium on the introduction of foreign autonomous driving technology until 2027. The stated reason is to delay market opening for two years under the guise of protecting domestic industries. One technology specifically targeted for this delay is the FSD (Full Self Driving Supervised) developed by the US electric vehicle company, Tesla.

Despite various safety concerns, countries around the world are easing regulations and pouring all their efforts into commercializing autonomous driving services. It’s a well-known fact that China fully supports autonomous driving as a core national industry, and recently even conservative Japan has shifted policies to actively introduce foreign autonomous driving technology, allowing US companies like Waymo and Tesla to start commercial services nationwide, even setting up rapid approval procedures.

If we create yet another regulation—a two-year moratorium—in the current situation, the gap with foreign technologies is highly likely to widen. This is because foreign companies will establish a circular learning framework, securing more data through commercial services and further elevating their technology levels in the meantime. The era where simple technology development was the only thing that mattered is over. Now, securing a sustainable business model is more crucial. From this perspective, a two-year moratorium not only blocks the public's opportunity to experience new technology but could actually hinder healthy competition in technology and business model development among companies.

Recently, the government has recognized issues revealed during the process of national projects and and has decided to invest 100 trillion KRW in the AI sector based on the principle of selection and concentration. The direction has been set to jointly use GPUs for training by establishing data centers, instead of distributing them to individual research teams. Going forward, the success or failure of new technology development will be determined by the scale of investment based on capital strength. Instead of a Galapagos strategy that locks the door against technology that is difficult to develop in the short term, we should prioritize introduction through strategic alliances with verified foreign companies, then progressively enhance service competitiveness and achieve domestic technology localization.

Written by Seo Seung-woo, Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University; Director, Intelligent Vehicle IT Research Center, Seoul National University. BS/MS in Electrical Engineering, Seoul National University; Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Penn State University. Former Assistant Professor, Computer Science Dept., Penn State University; Former Researcher, Electrical Engineering Dept. and POEM Lab (Intelligent Systems Research), Princeton University. Current research focuses on convergence technology such as Intelligent Vehicles and Smart Mobility. Committee Member, Infrastructure/Technology Subcommittee, MOLIT Autonomous Vehicle Convergence Future Forum. Operating Professor, LG Electronics Smart Car Joint Research Center, Seoul National University. Visiting Professor, Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS), 2013-2014.