Japanese corporate giants Sony and Honda announced a joint venture earlier this year that will see the pair produce battery-powered electric vehicles and a range of specialised mobility services.
The company, known as Sony Honda Mobility, plans to release its North American-built cars by 2025 with a potential novel feature – onboard PlayStation 5 consoles.
“Sony has content, services and entertainment technologies that move people. We are adapting these assets to mobility, and this is our strength against Tesla,” said Senior Vice President in charge of Sony’s AI Robotics Business Izumi Kawanishi, in a recent interview with the Financial Times.
Kawanishi pointed out that EV rival and market leader Tesla “is not providing any content services” giving Sony a potential USP in the EV sector with its “technologically possible” PlayStation 5 implementation.
Intriguingly, the joint venture is set to use Sony’s software as a focal point in the design and production stages of new EVs: “we will develop a car as hardware that will cater to the entertainment and network we would like to offer,” stated Yasuhide Mizuno, chairman and chief executive officer of Sony Honda Mobility Incorporated.
The move towards multimedia technology in cars tallies with the Sony Honda Mobility collaboration’s goal of fully autonomous driving, something that has so far eluded some of the largest car and technology companies in the world.
It’s not the first time Sony has dabbled in vehicle manufacturing, after its Vision-S 01 and Vision-S 02 EV concepts were first unveiled in 2020. Both appeared to be direct rivals to Tesla’s Model S and Y respectively.
Does playing Gran Turismo 7 while on the highways of America sound like a good idea to you? Will autonomous driving ever be in a position to make this happen? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Sony
