Sony and Honda will team up to sell electric cars under the brand name Afeela, with a plan to bring their first cars to market by 2026. The partnership unveiled a prototype that may preview that car at this week’s CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas.
The Automaker and the Electronics Giant Are Moving Fast
The effort was born at CES in 2020 when Sony showed off a concept car called the Vision-S. At last year’s show, Sony announced plans to launch an electric car brand and showed off two concept cars – a sedan and an SUV – it had built on its own. By March, Sony had announced plans to partner with Honda. The two spun off a new company to house the partnership called Sony Honda Mobility.
They publicly discussed plans to market their cars as, essentially, PlayStations on wheels with advanced entertainment systems and, eventually, self-driving capability.
Today’s announcement gives us a first look at what the pair have come up with working together.
Lots Of ‘Feeling It’ Jokes Already
The Afeela brand name, SHM says, “represents ‘feel,’ which is at the center of the mobility experience.”
“Afeela represents our concept of an interactive relationship where people feel the sensation of interactive mobility and where mobility can detect and understand people and society by utilizing sensing and AI technologies,” says SHM CEO Yasuhide Mizuno.
We feel ambivalent about the name. But the car has promise.
SHM didn’t give the car a name after announcing the brand name. They did say that it’s more than a display model, promising “SHM will develop the production model based on this prototype.”
Sleek, Minimalist Design For Everything But the Screens
It’s not the tall, Tesla-like sedan Sony first unveiled at last year’s event. Lower, sleeker, with a wide light bar similar to a Lucid and an abrupt rear end only slightly less surprising than that of the Hyundai Ioniq 6, it’s clean and minimalist. It lacks even visible door handles and has a concept car staple that never reaches production – tiny cameras instead of side mirrors.
Beneath that thin line of lights up front is a “media bar” that displays the Afeela name but can be personalized to “express itself to surrounding people,” the company says. We imaging they’ll have to limit what drivers can express eventually.
Inside, the minimalist theme continues for everything but screen space. The dashboard is one immense flat screen stretching from door to door, with distinct display areas for the driver’s instruments, climate and entertainment control, and an entertainment surface for the front passenger. Small side screens display what those rearview cameras pick up.
A yoke takes the place of a steering wheel. No word on whether it uses variable steering ratios like the yoke in some Toyota bZ4X models or requires hand-over-hand turns like Tesla’s yokes – an approach that has drawn many complaints.
Sony Honda Mobility says the car has a total of 45 cameras and sensors for various safety systems. The company claims the car will allow for Level 3 autonomous driving in some situations – a level of AI independence every automaker seems to be pursuing, but none have yet offered for sale.
And no, there’s no PlayStation controller in it. But Sony Honda Mobility says it has “started to build new values and concepts for mobility with Epic Games.”
What’s Driving This Thing?
That answers a lot of questions about an entertainment space but not the most vital questions about a car.
The company has provided no mechanical details other than to say that the Afeela sedan is electric and all-wheel drive. That likely means two electric motors, one per axle. But even that detail has been left out of presentations so far.
It uses a double-wishbone suspension up front, and an independent multilink suspension matched to wider tires in the rear. That setup suggests that more power goes to the rear wheels, but we’ll have to wait until they afeel like providing more details (we had to do it once. Never again).
Pre-orders will reportedly start in 2025, with customer deliveries planned for 2026.
