Introduction
At CES 2022, Sony announced its entrance into the car manufacturing industry, making it a hotly discussed topic globally. Whether Sony can claim a spot in the electric vehicle market with the VISION-S 02 and become a new business growth point will be the biggest point of interest.
Is VISION-S 02 powerful?
The VISION-S 02, based on a pure electric platform, doesn’t have many styling highlights to follow. The overall design is average, with the most notable difference from traditional models being the placement of the LOGO in the daytime running light. This may be imitated by other car companies in the future, and the large arch back design pushes the entire vehicle’s sporty styling to the extreme. As for the interior, the linking of three large screens not only enhances the vehicle’s sense of technology but also reserves the potential for Sony to deploy entertainment and gaming in the future.
In terms of autonomous driving technology, VISION-S 02 only plans to equip an L2+ advanced driving assistance system (ADAS) for public roads. Sony has not mentioned its plan for L4-level autonomous driving technology, which is currently widely mentioned by all parties. From a hardware perspective, there are up to 40 cameras, millimeter wave radar, and ultrasonic radar around the vehicle, but it is** missing the most popular lidar currently**.
Looking globally, only Tesla currently uses a pure vision-based solution, which is built on the basis of Tesla’s own development of dedicated autonomous driving chips and massive amounts of data. Other companies are likely to use lidar as an important component of environmental perception, and as the cost of solid-state lidar declines significantly, Sony needs to take more action in the field of autonomous driving in the future. Without advanced level autonomous driving technology, Sony’s electric vehicles will not have much competitiveness.
As for the three-electric components, the Sony VISION-S 02 has two 200KW motors, with an acceleration of 4.8 seconds per hundred kilometers and a maximum speed of 238km/h. In terms of parameters, the Sony VISION-S 02 can achieve a mainstream market position. In addition, the supply chain, which includes component companies such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, ZF, Bosch, QNX, BlackBerry, Marelli, Continental, and Magna, gives Sony more confidence in car manufacturing.
Why is Sony in a rush to build cars?At CES 2020, Sony launched VISION-S, but it claimed to focus more on autonomous driving. However, in the past two years, Sony has not made much breakthrough progress in autonomous driving. Nevertheless, with the trend of global electric vehicles being unstoppable and traditional Japanese giants like Toyota, Honda, and Nissan progressing relatively slowly in their electric vehicle strategies, electric vehicles are sure to occupy a significant share in the global market, including Japan, even if they cannot completely replace hybrid cars. Therefore, taking advantage of Toyota and Honda’s difficulty in fully transitioning to electric vehicles in the foreseeable three to four years, Sony can at least gain some sales in Japan and overseas markets where Japanese cars are more popular.
At CES 2022, Kenichiro Yoshida, the President and CEO of Sony, announced the establishment of** Sony Mobility Inc.**, *responsible for commercializing Sony’s electric cars*. From a corporate strategy perspective, Sony first established a separate business unit to pave the way for Sony to spin off this unit and seek separate listings in the future.
For Sony today, although it is still the world’s largest electronic product manufacturer, one of the six major movie studios in the world, and one of the three giants in the global electronic gaming industry, its continuous retreat in the mobile phone field has long since stripped it of its former dominance. Whether it can transfer its advantages in the entertainment industry to smart electric vehicles and once again gain fans’ favor will be the key to Sony’s success or failure and even its resurgence.
Sony’s Refinement in the Electric Car Market
With Sony announcing its own car production, consumer electronics companies manufacturing vehicles has become an unstoppable trend. In the near future, Apple will also announce its own car production plan. Compared with traditional car companies, consumer electronics companies come with entertainment and gaming attributes, which can provide users with a better immersive leisure experience during the ride. This capability cannot be achieved by simply adding a few large screens or introducing some IPs. In this field, both Sony and Apple, even facing Tesla, have their own strengths.From the perspective of the vast majority of users, the performance of current electric vehicles is already sufficient for daily driving. Even the previously criticized range anxiety is no longer a pain point for people to use cars, as battery energy density improves and charging networks are perfected. Therefore, if the electric vehicle market is further subdivided in the future, electric vehicles with a greater emphasis on entertainment will also become an important branch in the electric vehicle segmentation market. This is similar to the smartphone market, where some phones focus on photography while others prioritize gaming.
For Sony, Dyson’s abandonment of car manufacturing is a cautionary tale. As a fellow household appliance giant, Dyson also has accumulated experience in driving motors, solid-state batteries, and even robotics, having produced prototypes of cars. Dyson also has a relatively high level of brand appeal. However, even in this situation, Dyson ultimately did not initiate an actual car manufacturing project, disbanded related teams, and considered that manufacturing cars could not bring relatively positive impacts to the company in the short term investment-return trade-off. Sony will also face the problems encountered by Dyson. Avoiding these problems and smoothly moving forward on their own car manufacturing path is the biggest test for Sony, the aging electronic giant company.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.