The Vision S project presented by Sony at CES 2020 will turn into a real product: based on an electric chassis from Honda, the Afeela will be delivered in early 2026 to the first North American customers. An extraordinary electric car, loaded with 45 sensors and cameras and whose entire interface will be based on the Unreal Engine.
Goodbye Vision S, hello Afeela! the concept car futuristic that Sony had presented at CES 2020 then 2021 will become – once is not custom! – a reality. This Japanese-Japanese project brings together the electronics giant Sony and its compatriot Honda, which will provide the automotive platform. A platform on which Sony has designed a sedan taking advantage of an electronic and digital experience based on no less than 45 sensors and cameras. Afeela is only the prototype of an extraordinary automobile, which will be on pre-order from the first half of 2025 with the first deliveries in the spring of 2026 – only in the United States at first.
Read also: CES 2020: Sony creates a surprise by presenting the Vision-S, its first electric car (January 2020)
Read also: CES 2021: Vision-S: Sony’s electric car hits the road in Austria (January 2021)
From radar to lidar via the essential CMOS image sensor where it is the world number 1, Sony has integrated all the know-how it has acquired in the field of sensors to design a vehicle that promises autonomous driving. category 3. A level below full autonomy, but which allows the vehicle to be left in control in situations such as traffic jams for example.
The horde of sensors will not only serve driving, but also entertainment. Entertainment to which Sony is logically sensitive, through its involvement in cinema (Sony Pictures) but also in video games (PlayStation branch). But that will affect the entire auto and tech industry as a whole. Each player – like Intel and Warner at CES 2019 for example (video below) – wants to “occupy your available brain time” as soon as cars are 100% autonomous.
Qualcomm for computing, Unreal Engine for modeling
If Sony is the king of sensors and signal processing, it’s been a while since the Japanese delegated computing power to others. And it is Qualcomm and its Snapdragon Drive Flex platform that the Japanese will trust to control his first vehicle. Yesterday’s announcement that the first samples will be sent to partners this year with the availability of the first vehicles “between 2025 and 2026” supports this thesis.
See as well : The car of tomorrow will be a real on-board cinema – CES 2019 (January 2019)
Announcing wanting explore the possibilities of how media can create a fun and entertaining mobility experience “, Sony will take particular care of its user interfaces (UI and UX). And will use for that a 3D engine well known to players: the Unreal Engine. The car’s default rendering engine, the Unreal Engine will be used not only in the mapping system, interface modeling, etc. Sony has a special link with Epic (which designs this engine) since its PlayStation 5 is always at the forefront in the integration of the Unreal engine. Already in 2020, it was on this console that Epic demonstrated its 5e version, notably introducing the Nanite and Lumen technologies.
Read also: The power of the Playstation 5 is revealed with the Unreal Engine 5 (May 2020)
This communication around chips and a 3D rendering engine close to the world of video games logically invites us to ask ourselves questions around gaming use – on which Sony has not communicated. But also on the choice of the technical platform.
Automotive chips are apart
At first glance, it is surprising that Sony communicates around a video game experience that does not rely on the AMD components found in its PlayStation 5. If Sony has not commented on its choice of chips, automotive realities and announcements can enlighten us. On the news side, it is the announcement of the new Snapdragon Drive Flex platform which arrives (coincidentally!) at the same time as that of Sony. It is undoubtedly this platform that will propel the whole.
As for the reason for the non-use of chips in its console, it is simple: the chips that are put in cars must meet special specifications. From thermal amplitudes to the internal design of IP blocks, through electrical tolerances and software behaviors (redundancy, etc.), automotive chips are cut less for power than for resistance. However, neither the CPU nor the GPU (both co-developed with AMD) are designed for these uses. And the work to adapt them would be enormous. By using off-the-shelf at Qualcomm, Sony does not have this concern and benefits from a platform directly developed – and certified! – for the car.
Sony and Honda have not yet communicated any classic “automotive” technical details (power and performance, battery endurance, etc.) nor details on the internal interface of the automobile. Aside from the marketing in North America, the Japanese have also not given details about its arrival in other parts of the world.
Techcrunch.com
