They planned 300,000 units, but by opening day the figure had fallen to 280,000. Hyundai Mobis has started serial production of electric powertrain systems at its new plant in Novaky, Slovakia. And this is not just another assembly site. It is the company's first European facility dedicated specifically to PE systems — integrated modules combining an electric motor, inverter and reduction gear. Maximum design capacity reaches 280,000 systems a year.
That is where the story gets more interesting. When Hyundai Mobis announced the investment in October 2024, the plan was more ambitious: 300,000 electric drive systems annually. By the start of production, the figure had been cut by 20,000, or about 6.7%. Why? The company has not explained. It also has not disclosed actual output at launch, so 280,000 remains a maximum rated capacity rather than a current production figure.
Hyundai Mobis invested about 250 billion won in the project. The site covers roughly 106,000 m², while the building itself spans about 8,500 m². Production lines make stators — key electric-motor components — as well as inverters and other parts of the electric drive. The scale is serious, but the bigger question now is how quickly those lines can be filled with orders.
Slovakia is Hyundai Mobis' third European manufacturing base for electrification after battery-system facilities in the Czech Republic and Spain. The new plant is also not supposed to depend only on Hyundai and Kia. The supplier wants orders from other global automakers, although it has not named any customers for the Slovak-built PE systems yet. That is where the plant's biggest growth reserve may lie.
For Hyundai Mobis, Novaky is part of a much larger bet. The company is developing its own family of electric drive systems across multiple power classes and aims to raise the share of revenue from global customers to 40% by 2033. So the real test will not be the headline figure of 280,000 systems a year, but how much of that capacity is actually used. Big third-party contracts would validate the bet. Without them, the gap between the old 300,000 target and today's 280,000 may be the least interesting number in the story.
