On January 5, Sony unveiled the Afeela, its first electric car in partnership with Honda, at a presentation during CES 2023, in addition to the PS VR 2 and a PS5 accessible grip for people with disabilities.
The CEO of the joint venture, Sony Honda Mobility, Yasuhide Mizuno, said that the new car was named Afeela to bring a new driving experience to its owners.
The Afeela was driven right into the center of the stage during the launch event, but the delivery schedule is not that fast, waiting until 2025 for pre-sale, and the new car is expected to be delivered in the first quarter of 2026.
The Afeela has a simple and smooth appearance, with a design that bears some resemblance to the Vision-S, the prototype Sony unveiled at CES three years ago. The front features a combination of a closed grille and a through-light LED strip, with the Afeela centered and illuminated.
The prototype currently on display has three-dimensional dimensions (length, width and height) of 4895/1900/1460 mm and a wheelbase of 3000 mm, with a two-tone black and silver body, hidden door handles and low wind resistance wheels.
The interior of the car is also consistent with the simple design of the exterior, with a linked multi-screen running through the interior, an avant-garde Yoke style steering wheel and a large sunroof on top.
Perhaps for the sake of automation experience and driving safety, Sony Honda Mobility has equipped the Afeela with up to 45 sensor radars and cameras, even inside the car, which can be used to monitor the current driving status.
To ensure efficient processing and operation of sensor data, Afeela is equipped with an ECU with a maximum computing power of 800TOPS.
In terms of autonomous driving performance, Afeela can support L2+ level of autonomous driving and L3 level in some driving environments.
As another major point of Afeela, the in-car audio and video entertainment experience has become more interesting with the addition of Sony.
Sony will bring its own content ecosystem of movies, music and games into the car, and this is undoubtedly a very competitive feature of Afeela in the electric car market in the future.
Sony Honda Mobility will work with Epic Games to create a full range of interactive in-car entertainment experiences through the Unreal game engine.
At the conference, Sony Mobile revealed that it will also work with Qualcomm to build a stable infotainment dock for the Afeela using the Snapdragon Digital Chassis automotive solution.
Qualcomm also presented the Snapdragon Digital Chassis concept car at the same time, demonstrating features such as a large 55-inch car screen for functional zoning, interaction and display, as well as personalised audio partitioning in the car and vehicle collision recording.