Why is this interesting?

The scale and scope of Hyundai and Kia's ambitions in infrastructure and logistics are something to behold.

But do they have the permission to play at this level? And the depth of competence to execute?

The critical questions:

• Where do you currently have permission to play with consumers?

• What are the steps that you can take to extend your permission?

• Does your ambition build on your key competencies, or would a partnership help you go further?

• What opportunities open up when you shift your perspective from producing a product or delivering a service, to engaging with an ecosystem?

The detail:

If we're to believe Kia's PR hype, the city of the future will be run by the Korean car maker. From the smart city software to the commercial vehicles and robotaxis, from the architecture to digital and physical infrastructure, and even standards for logistics containers and loading dock heights, Kia wants to control them all.

Hyundai wants to do the same for the production, distribution and utilisation of hydrogen as a fuel source for mobility in local energy generation.

They're bold ambitions, but has either company earned the right to execute them? And do they have the competence?

Infrastructure is slow and expensive to build and in many cases builds on what came before. This demands a deep understanding of the history of a place and what makes it unique.

It also depends on the successful orchestration of many external stakeholders to implement. This demands an ability to engage with and accommodate the needs of competing interests. Neither of these have been core competencies of car companies, but are core to the competence of cities, and engineering, infrastructure and architecture firms.

Without evidence of these collaborations, Kia and Hyundai's presentations felt like well-intentioned student projects: they aim to solve huge problems, but do so in isolation from the complexity of the real world.

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