*This article is reproduced from the autocarweekly WeChat official account.
Author: Joey
That day, I was scrolling through a certain social media app. Strangely, the young ladies disappeared and were replaced by a popular portable cassette player that was prevalent in the 90s, and even earlier. Yes, it’s Sony’s Walkman.
For the post-95s and even post-00s who are internet natives, it may be hard to imagine how a device that played music from cassette tapes became popular on the streets and praised by young men and women as a “must-have” item. If you can’t imagine it, just look down at your iPhone, and you will probably understand.
At the top of the portable cassette player pyramid was SONY.
Since that era, Sony has become a “must-have” brand for generations of Chinese trendsetters. You may not have seen the Walkman, but you surely know PlayStation. You may not have seen Sony Ericsson, but you have definitely heard of Xperia. Sony is the ceiling of LCD TVs and is also dominant in noise-cancelling headphones. It can use AI to help musicians write songs, and it can use DSLRs to compete with Canon and Nikon in the field of imaging.
In short, if you were to vote for a technology brand that cannot be missed in your intelligent life, Sony must be at the forefront.
In the hearts of all digital enthusiasts, there is only one sentence that represents their love for Sony: “Sony is great!”
Therefore, Sony, who has made almost all digital products the best, seems to have no reason not to build cars. For Sony’s supporters, a car that integrates all of Sony’s “black technology” on the road seems to touch their deepest soul with the ultimate creativity.
With such expectations, when Sony presented the VISION-S at CES in 2020 and 2021, I was full of expectations. And this year, this expectation has turned into a new company called Sony Mobility Inc. This new company will be responsible for manufacturing the VISION-S, the autonomous entertainment robot aibo, and a series of tasks including the Airpeak drone.## Why does Sony have the opportunity to succeed?
Leaving Sony aside, there are too many companies entering the automotive manufacturing field nowadays. Whether they used to be a search engine or a mobile phone manufacturer, an electric scooter manufacturer or a vertical website operator, it seems that making intelligent electric vehicles can make these companies that were previously unrelated to cars enter the top ranks of future technology. Even many traditional car manufacturers have moved the “non-traditional” way, hoping to transform themselves into technology companies with electric cars.
Among them, the most eye-catching are probably Google and Apple, who many people expect to lead the future development trend of intelligent automobiles. Unfortunately, as early as 2016, Google had already given up on the direction of car manufacturing, and in Apple’s secret “Titan Project” which began in 2014, the only thing that could arouse people’s interest was the continuous resignation of top management (as of October last year, four Apple car executives had left).
In the field of new energy vehicle manufacturing in China, it seems that making electric cars is not difficult. However, it seems quite difficult for American companies that want to create intelligent electric cars or truly intelligent electric cars. Because creating truly intelligent electric cars, like the groundbreaking iPhone, requires strong creativity and strong industrial support. It’s not something that anyone can achieve just by crossing borders.
However, Sony seems to have the ability to achieve this goal.
You know, what I’m saying is not about following in Tesla’s footsteps and expanding peripheral products based on electric cars (for Sony, it could be the PS5). In fact, it is very easy for Sony to do so if they want to, because they have too many materials that can be integrated into cars.
Sony’s ultra-high-definition TV screens can be transplanted to cars for human-computer interaction screens; Sony’s in-car audio has been one of the favorite brands used by many car manufacturers for a long time; Sony’s cameras can be used for driving shooting (such as Sony’s Carlog), or for deep visual perception of vehicles.
In fact, Sony’s CMOS image sensor currently occupies nearly 50% of the global market share in the automotive industry. Additionally, Sony has deep technological accumulation in laser radar and cameras. Therefore, we can see that the VISION-S 02 is equipped with 18 cameras and 18 millimeter-wave radars, and 4 laser radars are used in conjunction.
Meanwhile, both leading manufacturers of intelligent driving chips, NVIDIA and Mobileye, have granted Sony access to their respective chips, so that both sides can be compatible. This means that Sony, with its years of accumulation, has become the most powerful and leading brand in the field of intelligent electric vehicles, both in the perception system of intelligent driving and in the hardware of intelligent cabins.
Recently, Sony based on the advantages of 5G network transmission speed, remotely controlled a VISION-S test car in Germany that was 9,400 kilometers away from Japan. Obviously, Sony’s series of operations indicate that Sony’s technological accumulation in the field of intelligent electric vehicles has reached a considerable level.
But has Sony won? The answer is not necessarily.
Smart interconnection is the goal.
Jun Wu, former vice president of Tencent, once commented on Baidu, one of the BAT giant, stating that it completely lacks the genes of mobile internet and has fallen behind in the new era. The same problem has also occurred with Sony.
In the earlier digital era, Sony could indeed dominate the market with stronger hardware technology and industrial design ability, but times have changed. With Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android systems almost invading into every area of digital electronic products, the hardware of electronic products has become a body, and software is the soul.
Enterprises that try to break through the software barrier usually suffer from failure. The most famous example is Microsoft, which monopolized the global market in the PC era. Its Windows Phone ended up with a low popularity due to problems such as software optimization and lack of applications, as software for multiple operating systems is a daunting task, and app makers are not willing to invest heavily in repetitive development.The departure from the smartphone sector signifies relinquishing the power of discourse in the era of intelligent connectivity. Of course, this issue is likely to reoccur with Sony. In the 2020 fiscal year, Sony’s net profit totaled 1.1718 trillion yen, but its most profitable businesses were gaming, music, and the high-revenue film and television entertainment sector. Obviously, in the more hardcore technological innovation fields, Sony has not presented results that meet the demands of the times in a striking way.
On the other hand, despite the popularity of the Xperia name, Sony still uses the Android system (a very Japanese system layout and optimization mode) for its smartphone business, which can only participate in chip upgrades, camera pixel upgrades, and the insistence on thinness, thus following the path of “internalization.” Obviously, the result of doing so is that Sony is likely to make its road narrower.
Thus, now is a good time for Sony to enter the automobile industry. On the one hand, with the development of mobile smart technology, as the terminal carrier of mobile intelligence, smartphones have begun to enter all aspects of people’s lives. Similarly, cars have also become the next key area in the development of smart phones. In short, the prospects for interconnectivity between smartphones and smart cars are relatively clear.
In the past year, many cases have also confirmed that more and more tech companies have foreseen this direction. For example, Huawei, which is fully engaged in the car networking business, Skyworth, which is starting to make cars, Geely, which is starting to make mobile phones, and “Lei Bus” which has chosen its factory location in Beijing, all hope to truly achieve connectivity between software and hardware systems through cars.
Similarly, based on the business scope of Sony’s mobile travel company, their main development direction is to place themselves in the development of smarter cars, smarter car networking systems, and smarter auxiliary intelligent devices. In other words, Sony has entered into the mainstream development path of technology companies by making cars.
Once Sony truly enters into this path, its past top-level leading technology in hardware devices will quickly achieve the stacking of intelligent car hardware, and then, through its advantages in industrial design, it will rapidly complete the overall construction of the smart car field.After all, if someone can play Switch in a car, who would refuse to play a 3A masterpiece game in a car? If AI intelligence can already create music, will applying it to human-computer interaction bring even greater surprises? If VR devices can allow people to immerse themselves in playing Resident Evil 8, can’t they also create a brand new “metaverse” in a car? If CMOS imaging can reproduce the shooting scene to the maximum extent, can the visual perception of intelligent cars jump to a new level again?
These are all fresh imagination about future intelligent cars that Sony can bring to us. Of course, these imaginations are still limited to the basis of Sony’s existing technology and equipment. What digital technology enthusiasts like me want to see is that Sony breaks away from these existing technologies and brings us a brand-new solution for intelligent cars or intelligent travel. Just like when Jobs presented the iPhone that integrates music player, phone and internet notebook, it was a stunning masterpiece.
And at that time, I’m afraid we could still blurt out the sentence: “OMG, Sony is really awesome!”
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.