Yahoo Finance Sony announces it is making an electric smart car - beating Apple to it
Sony has announced that it is starting an electric car company called Sony Mobility this spring.
Sony president, Kenichiro Yoshida, presented a prototype sport utility vehicle called the Sision-2 02 at the Consumer Electronics Show yesterday. This is the second version of the VIsion S 01, which was tested on public roads in Europe from December 2020.
The car has seven seats and is just under five metres long, and although there is no information about its acceleration Sony has said that the original Vision S can reach over 60 miles per hour in under five seconds. It is estimated the new car has a top speed of over 112mph, Auto Express reports.
Innovation of mobility.
Sony's Vision-S #CES2022 pic.twitter.com/lLykDAUapB— Sony (@Sony) January 5, 2022
“With our imaging and sensing, cloud, 5G and entertainment technologies combined with our content mastery, we believe Sony is well positioned as a creative entertainment company to redefine mobility,” he said, as reported by The Guardian.
The car will have seat speakers to create a “three-dimensional sound field”, the Financial Times reports, that will wrap around passengers and will allow game streaming via a PlayStation console. Other features include drivers customising sounds in the car.
Sony says that it is currently “exploring a commercial launch” of the electric vehicles, and is not the only one to do so. Apple has been long-rumoured to be developing a car, with some reports say that a self-driving electric vehicle could launch in 2024.
Elon Musk’s Tesla is now the world’s most valuable automaker, but it took the company 17 years to turn a profit from its electric cars and recently had to recall nearly 500,000 vehicles over safety concerns.
However, building electric and smart cars could prove difficult over the next few years, as the chip shortage that has caused trouble across the world could continue into 2023.
As the pandemic grew, car companies reacted by reducing manufacture and lowering their orders for parts - including computer chips that go into vehicle control systems.
