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Journalism of Courage
At CES 2024, Sony once again demoed its EV prototype car dubbed Afeela. Sony Honda Mobility COO Izumi Kawanishi recently drove the car on the stage using a PlayStation 5 DualSense controller all for the sake of a tech demo.
While the company did not share any details on what features the EV packs, we now have a good idea of how Afeela will look and feel. The feature-packed car sports a huge ultrawide dashboard screen that extends the width of the car with the bumper packing another screen.
Called Media Bar, the video suggested that the bumper screen can display information like a warning sign, birthday greeting, check remaining battery and even logos from popular Sony titles like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition and Epic Games’ Fortnite.
Sony Afeela uses Unreal Engine 5.3 to display graphical content on the massive ultrawide dashboard display. In addition to the instrument cluster, the display also doubles up as an infotainment system that can be used to play games, watch movies and for AR navigation. The software is also used to render the environments that are used to train the car’s multi-camera driver assistance systems and to train the EV’s driver aid functionality.
The Japanese tech giant demoed a new game called Monster View that shows the part of the road you are viewing on the dashboard along with some virtual beasts, actively encouraging the driver to catch them all while driving.
Sony Afeela might also get a new feature called ‘Smart Entry’ that automatically unlocks and opens doors when the owner is standing in front of the car. In the video, we also see what Sony calls ‘Advanced Driver Assistance Systems’ that enables the car to automatically take turns and park the car, detect objects on the road, change lanes, and stop before the zebra crossing. It also features Spatial Audio support alongside a unique noise-cancelling system.
The electric vehicle is expected to debut sometime in 2026, but we have no word about availability and price. Sony has been working on electric cars for years now. In 2020, the company showed an early version of the Vision-S 01 prototype, which was followed by its successor – the Vision-S 02 in 2022.
