The official company name is Sony Honda Mobility Corporation, car to arrive in 2026
- Sony and Honda are building an electric car
- There are ties to the Sony Vision-S Concept of 2020
- Deliveries are planned for 2026
If you had one of the world’s giant audio/visual companies tag teaming with one of the world’s giant automakers to produce an entirely new vehicle brand on your 2023 bingo card, go ahead and mark off that space. As for the rest of us, news that Sony and Honda have jumped into bed on electric vehicle production is something of a whiplash moment.
After all, there’s no shortage of vapourware in the EV market, and it has been three long years since Sony showed off its first concept car — waaaay back in pre-Covid times during CES 2020. At the time, it was called the Vision-S Concept, sized nearly as large as a Tesla Model S and packing enough juice from its dual electric motors to produce a healthy 268 horsepower. At the time, Sony said it had no interest in, y’know, actually building the thing, instead referring to it as a test bed for some of its technological aspirations.
Oh, how times can change.
You’re now looking at the Afeela, a machine described as a ‘proposal for new mobility’ and the product of a joint venture called Sony Honda Mobility Corporation. For the sake of safety and security, the prototype is equipped with a total of 45 cameras, sensors, and other gubbins inside and outside the car in an effort to fuse the real and virtual worlds while providing the type of advanced driving aids we’ve been expecting ever since the Jetson debuted in 1962.
See that strip of illumination up front between the headlights? That’s not a callback to the Mercury light bar of thirty years ago, but is instead a so-called ‘media bar’ which can apparently display all manner of information and potentially even be personalized. Now, we wholly expect Daddy Government to decree exactly just how customizable that media bar can be, mainly because the Driving staff has had zero trouble coming up with creative phrases to display at other drivers on the Don Valley Parkway. That aside, the Afeela could certainly use the space for useful charging info and other duties while parked.
The company is mum on motor count and battery capacity, though it did say the Afeela is all-wheel drive and is suspended by double-wishbones up front and an independent multilink out back. If that sounds like the we’re-totally-not-building-this Sony Vision-S mentioned earlier, you’re exactly right. Inside, look for a host of screens as part of a typically minimalist interior, including a full-width bank which will surely have some sort of PlayStation capability since Sony is involved and Epic Games was mentioned in the bumf. Also, it’ll be a missed opportunity if they don’t apply the Bravia branding on at least one of the screens; we’re printing up stickers right now just in case.
Development of a production car will begin ‘based on this prototype’, says SHM. Pre-orders are planned for launch in the first half of 2025, with North American deliveries anticipated for the spring of 2026 comprising of machines built at a Honda plant on this continent.
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