Hyundai wants you to overclock your car with your phone

Hyundai app
Image credit: Hyundai Motor Group

If your next car is electric, you might be able to tune its performance on the move using a smartphone app, and trade profiles with other drivers.

Hyundai's new system will pair your phone with your car, and let you tweak settings including the maximum speed, acceleration and deceleration abilities, regenerative braking, ignition, and maximum torque output.

The app can recommend particular settings for optimizing performance, or giving a sportier feel. It can provide presets for different driving conditions, and you can even save your profiles and share them with other drivers.

That could be very helpful if you've developed settings that are perfect for your local roads (narrow and winding, or slick and icy in winter, for example), or you plan to lend your car to your kids and want to limit what it can do.

Hyundai app

Image credit: Hyundai Motor Group

Wanna trade?

Sharing custom profiles could have terrible consequences if the data was intercepted and interfered with. so Hyundai is planning to use blockchain technology to prevent security issues as custom settings are shifted to and from its servers.

“As Hyundai Motor Group is planning to deploy 44 eco-friendly models by year 2025, including 23 electric vehicles, we see the potential of technologies and services inherent in non-combustion vehicles,” said Hyundai research fellow Jeong Soo Eo.

The company hasn't yet announced when the tech will appear in production cars, but it's planning to add it to both Hyundai and Kia models in the near future.

Cat Ellis

Cat is the editor of TechRadar's sister site Advnture. She’s a UK Athletics qualified run leader, and in her spare time enjoys nothing more than lacing up her shoes and hitting the roads and trails (the muddier, the better)