Hyundai’s Ulsan complex has been the company’s main production site since 1968 and is, by size, the largest single integrated automobile plant in the world: about 5 million square metres, employing roughly 34,000 people, with a combined annual capacity of around 1.4 million vehicles.
The site is organised into five separate plants, each assigned its own models rather than running one shared line. Plant 1 builds the Kona, Ioniq 5 and the Genesis GV60; Plant 2 builds the Santa Fe, Tucson and Palisade alongside the Genesis GV70 and GV80; Plant 3 builds the Elantra and Venue; Plant 4 builds the Porter and the Staria; and Plant 5 builds the Nexo alongside the Genesis G70, G80 and G90. A sixth plant, sized for 200,000 electric vehicles a year and intended for the Genesis GV90, is under construction.
That layout is the detail that settles a claim several ranking sites get wrong: that Genesis is built in factories separate from Hyundai. It is not. Genesis is a division of Hyundai Motor Company rather than an independent manufacturer, and its Korean-built cars share the Ulsan complex, and in the case of the GV80, the exact same plant, as Hyundai’s own SUVs. Genesis vehicles sold outside Korea can come from elsewhere - Hyundai’s Alabama plant builds some US-market Genesis models - but the Korean range is an Ulsan product line, not a separate factory.