In the middle of last year, Sony’s Vision-S electric vehicle went from being a mere prototype to something the company said it wanted to bring closer to reality. In July, Sony announced that it planned to start testing the vehicle on public roads by the end of 2020. True to its word, it did just that. Although it did not provide a substantial update on EV in its CES 2021 lecture, Sony says it started testing EV in Europe in December and shared a clip of the car driving on picturesque Austrian roads – the Airpeak drone recently announced by the company as well makes an appearance in the video.
When Sony first unveiled the S-Vision at CES 2020, it said it created it to showcase its technology to companies in the automotive industry. The prototype we saw at the fair featured two 200 kW engines and was able to accelerate to 62 MPH in 4.8 seconds. At the time, Sony said the car also had level 2 autonomous driving capability, but that it planned to make it more autonomous in the future.