ELLABELL, Georgia — “My story begins just down the road, having been born and raised right here in Ellabell. As a young girl, I used to ride four-wheelers in the woods near the Metaplant property.”

Charlene Toole, a representative of the employees at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, called herself “the definition of a small town girl” and Ellabell her forever home.

“I never would have imagined that it would also become home to such a large career opportunity for me,” she said.

HMGMA, the Korean automaker’s newest auto manufacturing site in the US, has opened up possibilities for local residents to build the future of mobility together — exactly what Hyundai hoped to create with the establishment of the state-of-the-art plant.

The Korea Herald had a chance to tour the inside of HMGMA on Thursday, a day after the plant's grand opening ceremony.

Covering 11.76 million square meters, HMGMA’s production line began with an unusual stamping process, which had a lower noise level than other traditional stamping facilities at legacy automakers.

The aisles were stacked with thousands of pressed metal sheets transported through an automated storage and retrieval system, and the floors were bustling with automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, carrying tens of panels.

Kim Han-gon, vice president of HMGMA production group, shared that the warehouse can store enough supplies to back up production for 1 1/2 days. According to Kim, HMGMA has secured an automation rate of 91 percent for vehicle body panel production.

“All products are controlled by machines and we use vision quality inspections as well as an (artificial intelligence-based) quality control system to craft the best quality,” he said.

Numerous robotic arms were constantly moving at the welding shop, putting together the panels to build vehicle bodies. HMGMA boasts a 100 percent automation rate for the welding shop, featuring the world’s first application of an autonomous correction system that can ensure zero gaps when installing the doors on the body of a car.

At the end of the welding process, Spot, a four-legged surveillance and inspection robot developed by Hyundai Motor’s US robotics arm Boston Dynamics, checked the body condition of each vehicle.

The most pleasant surprise of the HMGMA tour was in the assembly shop, where an arch-shaped roof with glass panels shed sunlight on the workers' rest areas and wooden structures add a nature-like atmosphere. Thanks to the sunlight shining through the glass roof, the inside of the assembly shop felt lively.

On top of focusing on setting up a human-centric working environment, HMGMA designed the assembly shop in a way that it could feature more automation than ever.

In contrast to traditional assembly shops where hundreds of workers are stationed along a conveyor belt to assemble various parts of the vehicle, HMGMA uses AGVs to transport the cars in some steps of the assembly process. After the vehicles are fully assembled, parking robots on the ground transport the final products through an uncrewed quality check.

Overall, HMGMA brought Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center Singapore to mind, the Korean automaker’s test bed established in 2023 to advance smart mobility solutions.

Kwon Oh-chung, head of HMGMA, noted that there were about 880 employees at the software-defined factory.

“We have been trying to hire locals as quickly as we can through various channels,” he said.

“We have been going to nearby schools and military camps while partnering with technical colleges … We have people who take pride in their work here.”