Sony released several videos showing its Sony VISION-S electric car concept, which was first unveiled in a surprise move a year ago at CES.
The videos provide new insights into the design and engineering of the car, comments from partners Sony is working with, and reveal that Sony has started testing its vehicle on public roads near its engineering center in Graz, Austria.
We haven’t heard much about Sony’s EV project since its CES debut last year, but Sony took the opportunity to it is CES only online of the year to pull the curtain some more.
Last year’s launch had little information, so we don’t have much to build on. The announced specifications included a variety of sensors for autonomous driving, an “immersive audio experience”, a “software-driven design”, 400 kW (536 hp) four-wheel four-wheel drive, 0-100km / h (0 -62mph) in 4.8 seconds and a top speed of 240km / h (149mph).
We still don’t have information on availability, price or battery size. In fact, although there are some parts of this video that show the car driver and the range finder, both the battery percentage and the remaining range units are zeroed, so we can’t even get an idea of that. And Sony hasn’t said a word about production or distribution plans, which means that there is still a lot to be done before putting VISION-S in the hands of customers.
Still, the new video offers some interesting insights. It switches between Japanese and English, but you can use YouTube closed captions for a translation:
Sony says it has increased the number of sensors for autonomous driving to 40 out of the 33 previously announced. This does not mean much in itself (cars have a wide variety of number and types of sensors), but apparently Sony felt they needed more than originally planned.
Sony’s “software-oriented design” is the focus of much of the video, showing how Sony can leverage its entertainment device experience to create better software for a car.
The most attractive feature of the original VISION-S concept was a large widescreen display that covered the entire panel, and Sony seems to be adhering to it as it continues to develop the vehicle. At one point, a PlayStation controller is shown connected to the screen playing Little Big Planet, a PlayStation game.
Sony partners talked about the importance of communications and the cloud in today’s vehicles, and a Bosch representative praised Sony’s human-machine interface capabilities (side note: Bosch recently took a stupid stance against EVs, despite being a major supplier of EV equipment).
This human-machine interface seems to include facial, speech and gesture recognition. A part of the video shows thermal images of the cabin while the driver gestures with one hand and also shows a facial and speech recognition system being trained
Although Sony did not say when the VISION-S would be launched, Horst Schaffer of Continental said that “he has a feeling that all parties involved want to take this vehicle out as quickly as possible”.
See more in another short “road test” video, which has no narration, but shows the Sony VISION-S driving on some snowy Austrian public and private roads. The car is camouflaged, but it doesn’t seem to hide much – especially considering that we saw it without camouflage at CES last year.
Electrek’s Take
When Sony first showed this concept last year, we were skeptical about whether it was a real deal or just a vehicle for Sony to showcase the potential applications of its entertainment devices in the automotive space.
The fact that they continued with the project last year and have an impressive list of partners in the traditional automotive supply that appeared in the video suggests that perhaps this is more real than we originally thought.
But we’re still running low on specs, and the video is still full of rigid corporate PR-style statements that leave us wanting more. Looks like all has an EV prototype today and so few of them actually hit the road that we have to be skeptical of any new one we see.
As we said after the last announcement, at least the concept of Sony is not strange, unlike some other presentations. Nothing in VISION-S is particularly irrational. this could certainly be done, for a reasonable price, but premium, with the specifications we’ve seen – which include many of the features expected from EV concepts today. And Sony is big and established enough to bring together the necessary resources and partners.
The facial and gesture recognition features, the giant screen and some other proposed features go a bit beyond the limits, but they are close enough to reality that they don’t immediately complain about this project.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the project is that it comes from a large and old Japanese company. Sony is by no means a startup and large Japanese conglomerates are known to be relatively conservative in their business decisions, so a big shift to a capital-intensive, fast-moving industry (EVs, specifically) is worth a raised eyebrow or two. .
Meanwhile, Japan is making embarrassingly mild commitments on green cars, apparently to protect its intransigent, hybrid-obsessed and anti-EV auto industry (see examples of statements by Honda, Toyota and Mazda). And yet, Sony is still moving forward with an entirely interesting EV project.
Sony is much smaller than Toyota or Honda, but almost as big as Nissan and much bigger than Mazda. The only Japanese automaker that has demonstrated consistent support for electric cars is Nissan, and the rest have little or nothing to offer. They have some models on the way, some of which are discouraging and others that look very entertaining, although the company is obviously hostile to its existence.
So there is definitely a vacuum in the Japanese EV industry, and Sony could fill it. If they do, there will be plenty of room for them to climb the ladder of the biggest Japanese companies and steal market share from bigger companies that think they can sit on their laurels and continue selling hybrid gas consumers until 2035, when the world will have outgrown the idea of burning dead dynamized material to get to the store and return.
But, as we always say, what matters is getting the car on the road, fast and in large quantities. Sony could have a stake in these other companies, but they will have a much better chance of doing so if they reach the market. Fortunately for Sony, much of the competition (domestically) and internationally) is dragging their feet quite hard, so they have an opportunity if they can get it all together fast enough.
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