Sony Honda Mobility The company plans to start shipping its electric Afila vehicle in 2026. But the joint venture has already shown off some impressive features of its new car.
I recently saw a new demo of the car and its driving simulator at Sony’s PlayStation headquarters in San Mateo, California, where I got to see some of Sony’s unique features on the new Afila.
On the hood of the car, just above the bumper, there is a “media bar” where you can read messages. The media bar on the car greeted me by name, “Welcome, Dean Takahashi :)”. The media bar can be programmed to display anything, such as “Happy Birthday”. You can place the Spiderman logo on it and it will light up to show it.
Based on the theme of “redefining the relationship between people and mobility,” the car is also equipped with advanced safety features such as “AI for ADAS,” as well as a mechanism that allows users to unleash their creativity by “turning mobility into a creative entertainment space.” For safety reasons, the car is also equipped with a camera that detects pedestrians and other obstacles in the environment.
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Sony and Honda are also working with Epic Games to develop new entertainment and gaming features that leverage virtual worlds. Game developers can freely target applications and services that run on Afeela’s computing platform. Microsoft is developing a conversational personal agent with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Services.
Sony Honda Mobility has partnered with Polyphony Digital, the game studio behind the car racing game Gran Turismo, to develop a vehicle that blends virtual and real life. I was able to simulate the vehicle’s technology in a simulator developed by Polyphony Digital.
AI for ADAS
The AI for ADAS utilizes sensing devices and AI, adopting Vision Transformer for recognition and machine learning for route planning. In addition, a redundant system will be developed to ensure safety. This system will use Qualcomm Technologies’ high-performance SoC for automobiles.
The tool simulates external environmental conditions such as other vehicles, pedestrians, terrain, weather information, etc. Combining this technology with AR gives users an immersive experience that also improves safety.
Sony Honda Mobility will provide 3D maps overlaid with extensive metadata from the internet. The map data can also be used to open up new possibilities in the development of games and entertainment features.
To integrate sensing and vehicle data to enable these features, Sony Honda Mobility is using the powerful game engine, Unreal Engine 5. The company is using the latest version of Unreal Engine 5.3 and will continually implement updates to keep up with the latest Unreal Engine advancements, meaning the car can be updated.
Speaking of safety, Sony and Honda are working on technology to find ways for front passengers to watch movies or play games without being seen or distracted by the driver. I asked Sony Honda Mobility product specialist Rhys Williams if the viewing angle would prevent passengers from seeing the display, and Williams said the company is working on it but couldn’t provide details yet.
Entertainment space
Rather than simply locking knowledge away in-house, Sony Honda Mobility will provide an environment in which creators and developers can freely develop applications and services that run on Afeela, as well as a digital platform for co-creation and the expression of creativity.
The program includes Conversational Personal Agents, an agreement with Microsoft to develop a conversational personal agent using Microsoft Azure OpenAI services.
Sony Honda Mobility will collaborate with Polyphony Digital on vehicle development, combining the company’s simulation technology with SHM’s actual vehicle development to develop vehicles that blend the virtual and real, primarily in the areas of human senses and emotions.
The exterior of the car is equipped with LIDAR sensors that detect the surrounding environment for autonomous driving functions.
The car will feature AR navigation, with turn-by-turn directions showing lines to follow in the environment, and an AR overlay on the user interface.
The interior of the car is super attractive, scary, and cool for gamers. It has an inward-facing camera on the driver that checks if they’re distracted by cell phone use or drowsy. AI kicks in to determine a course of action and proactively sends out warnings on the spot.
There’s a media bar with a display that stretches from the dash on the driver’s side to the center console and onto the passenger side – it’s a continuous display.
The outer media bar is a way to send welcome messages to the driver and passengers.
open the door
If you’re used to opening car doors, you’ll notice something different about this car. It’s similar to a Tesla door handle in that it’s confusing. There’s no door handle. There’s a door button. You press it and the door opens. You can also open it with your smartphone.
When you sit in the driver’s seat, the seat and steering column move towards you. Use the memory seat function to adjust the seat to suit you. A welcome message also appeared on the dashboard display. For now, it can only show images, but in the future, it will greet you with sounds and lights.
The main screen stretches from edge to edge but can be split into several sections, hence the name “panoramic” screen, which Sony says reduces driver distraction by displaying all the important information easily in front of you.
In the back, both rear seat passengers have screens on which they can watch TV or movies, play games or listen to music.
Williams said the company is also currently working on a three-person streaming option that would allow three passengers to watch the same thing at the same time.
The steering is a “yoke” rather than a wheel. It has a control system that will be familiar to gamers, with buttons on either side of the centerline. The right-hand button controls the driver assistance features. Afeela’s pillars are Augmentation, Autonomy and Affinity.
Williams said the name Afeela represents the company’s commitment to being at the center of the mobility experience, and its goal is to create emotion. When you take that idea of creating emotion, along with scalability, autonomy and affinity, several design priorities become clear:
Augmentation, Williams said, refers to customizing the vehicle to make it unique. For example, say you have a favorite cafe. You can see a list of cafes on a screen with a map. You can zoom in and out of that area, change the theme and the ambient lighting. For example, it could be made to match Sony’s Gran Turismo game or the PSVR 2 headset, if you want. Currently, the branding is based on Sony’s game, but who knows what will happen in the future.
It was cool to see the ambient lighting inside the car change to match the Miles Morales Spider-Verse theme. The lighting also changes on the top of the car. The car has 360-degree spatial audio, so you feel like you’re in a surround sound field that’s more like a concert venue than a car. If you roll the windows up all the way, people outside the car might not be able to hear the music.
Afeela also comes with the Stingray Karaoke app, allowing you to sing along live in your car, and PlayStation Remote Play lets you remotely connect to your PS4 or PS5 gaming console and carry on gaming in the back seat of your car.
Autonomy and Affinity
Sony ultimately aims to achieve Level 3 autonomous driving in a variety of conditions, as well as Level 2+ autonomous driving. The car is equipped with cameras, sensors, processors and machine learning/AI, much of which is dedicated to improving safety and improving situational, human and vehicle awareness. The result is better situational awareness in adverse weather conditions, which gives drivers more peace of mind.
Affinity is the idea of working with creators and developers from all over the world. We give you a platform to create your own content and run with it freely. Cars help you express yourself and show off what you create.
simulation
While I couldn’t drive the real Afila, I got to see what it felt like to drive it by driving the simulator. The simulator has a physical shape as close as possible to the real car, plus virtual augmentations such as a screen showing what it would feel like to drive the car in a city. I got to drive the car and obey the traffic laws, something I never do in a PlayStation game, but it was a lot of fun.
This car is now ready for pre-sale and we are sure it will be a great machine especially for gamers.
