Sony-Honda Mobility has unveiled what is set to be the company's first car and has announced that it will be sold under its new Afeela brand.
The company is a joint venture formed last year between the two Japanese giants, one of which has been building cars for decades, the other which has only begun expressing its desire to enter the automotive field over the past couple of years with the reveal of concept cars at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 2021 and 2022.
Sleek saloon
The firm has continued its form with the unveiling at CES 2023 (currently underway) of a good-looking electric saloon prototype, and while it revealed little in the way of technical details, the visual aspects of the car appear to be finalised.
The saloon differs significantly from Sony's 2021 Vision-S concept in a number of styling areas, but retains similar overall dimensions and themes with a smooth slippery look, large panoramic roof and a five-seat interior festooned with screens.
Looking something like a blend of Lucid Air and Porsche 911, the Afeela sits on a set of aerodynamically-optimised 21-inch wheels with cameras in place of door mirrors and no door handles.
Abundant screens
Inside, the design is clean and bright with an array of screens spanning the entire dashboard incorporating the door mirror displays, driver's instrument cluster, central infotainment screen and another display for the passenger. The second row features screens as well, mounted on the rears of the front seats allowing back-seat passengers to potentially connect to and play games on Sony's PlayStation network. Overall, the design is slick and ultra-modern with few buttons beyond those on the yoke-style steering wheel.
What's underneath?
At this stage, what will power the Afeela is anyone's guess; the most likely scenario is that the model will be based on Honda-developed architecture, though a platform sourced from General Motors could also be a possibility, with Honda currently engaged in a platform-sharing arrangement with the American firm.
Honda is, at present, something of a laggard in the EV field and, though it plans to launch some 30 new electric vehicles globally by 2030 and for 40 per cent of its European sales to be electric vehicles by then, it currently only has one electric model - the Honda e city car - on sale. Joint ventures such as its one with General Motors will form a big part of the company's plans to meet its targets, so input from another carmaker into the Afeela isn't beyond the realms of possibility.
One thing that is clear about what will lie under the Afeela's body is that the new car will employ Qualcomm's Snapdragon Digital Chassis technology - enormously powerful computer architecture capable of handling the input from the car's 45 different cameras and sensors, processing some 800 trillion operations per second and of providing the core of the Afeela's advanced driver assistance and safety technology. The Afeela saloon, Sony-Honda says, will be capable of Level 3 autonomy, something already seen on some cars such as in the Drive Pilot system in the Mercedes S-Class.
Coming to Ireland?
Production of the Afeela saloon is due to begin in 2025 with the first deliveries expected by the end of that year. The model will go on sale in the United States initially and, based on Sony's Vision-S 02 concept, don't be surprised to see the Afeela brand also unveil an SUV later in 2023 or, perhaps, true to form, at CES 2024.
There have been no suggestions so far from Sony-Honda, however, that the brand will make it to Europe, let alone to Ireland.