Hyundai Mobis Opens First European Electric Drive Systems Plant in Slovakia

Hyundai Mobis just finished building a production triangle across Europe, and Slovakia is its newest corner. The supplier opened its first European plant for electric drive systems in Nováky earlier this month, adding a third production base alongside the battery assembly plants it runs in the Czech Republic and Spain.

It calls the new components PE systems, short for Power Electric systems. Each one packs an electric motor, an inverter and a reduction gear into a single unit, effectively the part of an EV that turns battery energy into motion at the wheels. Hyundai Mobis has taken to calling it the heart of the car, and it’s not far off.

The numbers behind the Nováky plant

The site covers around 106,000 square metres, roughly the size of 15 football pitches, with 8,500 square metres of factory floor given over to production lines for stators, inverters and other PE components. At full capacity, Hyundai Mobis says the plant can build 280,000 PE systems a year, enough for 280,000 electric vehicles since each car only needs one.

That figure is lower than what Hyundai Mobis originally promised, though. When it signed the investment agreement with the Slovak government back in October 2024, the plan called for 300,000 units annually. The company hasn’t explained the drop to 280,000, though it could reflect a more cautious read on near term customer demand, or it could simply be a refinement of the original projection once construction got underway. According to electrive.com’s reporting, the investment sum has stayed fixed at roughly €150 million throughout.

Building drive units for anyone

Hyundai Mobis wants Nováky to supply Hyundai Motor and Kia first and foremost, but it’s chasing business well outside its own group too. The company builds these drive units as standardised products in three power classes, 120 kW (163 PS), 160 kW (218 PS) and the existing 250 kW (340 PS) unit, sold to whichever automaker wants them, not designed to one customer’s exact specification. Hyundai Mobis hasn’t said which of these three will be produced in Nováky.

Slovakia already has deep roots in car manufacturing, which helps the pitch. Kia builds vehicles nearby in Žilina, where Hyundai Mobis also runs a separate plant making brake systems and airbags. Volkswagen and Stellantis both operate factories in the country, and Volvo Cars is building a new one in Košice. That existing base gives Hyundai Mobis short delivery routes to several automakers without needing to win entirely new customers from scratch, though the company hasn’t confirmed any of them as buyers from this plant yet.

The Nováky plant actually fits a company’s bigger target. Hyundai Mobis wants 40 percent of its revenue to come from customers outside the Hyundai Motor Group by 2033, and Europe, the world’s second largest EV market after China, sits at the centre of hitting that number. Nováky is now the supplier’s third electrification production base on the continent, joining the battery system assembly plants in the Czech Republic and Spain, where it also builds battery systems for the Volkswagen Group.

Featured Image: Hyundai Mobis