Announced last week at CES 2023Sony and Honda’s new smart car prototype seems to be based on Elon Musk’s Tesla, which allows people to launch PlayStation 4 and 5 games from the indoor screens. But Sony may also be planning to use the car as a way to advertise shit on the outside while you’re driving around. Welcome in the future. It sucks.
the afeela, The new Smart EV from Sony and Honda (Electric Vehicle) is a joint venture between the two major companies that aims to leverage both Sony’s advanced technology and Honda’s decades-old automobile manufacturing heritage. The result is a new super-sleek and tech-packed prototype EV that Sony claims will hit the streets in a couple of years. And if it is, then apparently you can use it to play PS5 games.
To be clear, you can’t just pop a PS5 disc in the car as Afeela uses cloud streaming to let owners and passengers play PS5 and PS4 games on the go, provided you have a decent signal or internet connection. You can also watch movies and TV shows through the various screens in the car.
But the Afeela doesn’t just have screens in the interior. No, like a weird future episode of a Pimp my car Rebooting, the Afeela also features an outer widescreen display. Sony calls this the car’s “media bar” and says owners can view a variety of data, including the current weather and the car’s battery level. It can also be used to display different colors or images. Yasuhide Mizuno, CEO of Sony Honda Mobilitysays that with the media bar, owners can “express themselves” by sharing different types of information with people around them [the car].”
Sony also has some not-so-cool plans for this new media bar. During his CES showcase Sony briefly ran an ad for Spider-Man: No Way Home on the outside screen. Not much more was said about that brief moment of the event, aside from Mizuno suggesting that Sony talk to partners about how they can use the media bar to create “fun and exciting” interactions. That sounds a lot like Sony wanting to turn Afeelas into mobile billboards.
G/O Media may receive a commission
$50 off pre-order
Ring Car Cam
It’s a camera. For your car.
Ring Car Cam’s dual-sided HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
All of that is still a few years away, of course, as Sony and Honda say the Afeela won’t be out until 2026. But as a taste of what to expect from future smart cars, things aren’t looking good. When you consider how ad-infested smart TVs are already in 2023, I’m also not looking forward to cars being covered with screens and advertising. I think I’ll hardly notice it when I’m playing a sluggish PS5 game over the cloud in the backseat of the Afeela. Nevertheless, I thought the future would be cooler.
