It was announced at CES 2023 last weekSony and Honda’s new smart car prototype Elon Musk seems to be taking a page from Tesla, allowing people to download PlayStation 4 and 5 games through their built-in screens. But Sony may also plan to use the car to advertise outside while you’re out and about. Welcome to the future. This is bad.
Afela, Sony and Honda’s new smart EV (electric car), a joint venture between the two major companies designed to leverage both Sony’s cutting-edge technology and Honda’s decades of automotive production. The result is a new, super-fantastic and tech-packed prototype EV that Sony claims will hit the streets in a few years. And when it does, you’ll probably be able to use it to play PS5 games.
Now to be clear, you won’t be able to just pop a PS5 drive into the car, as Afeela will be using cloud streaming to allow owners and passengers to play games. PS5 and PS4 games on the go provided you have a good signal or internet connection. You will also be able to watch movies and TV through various screens inside the car.
But Afeela doesn’t just have screens in the interior. No, like a weird future episode of a Pimp My Ride reboot, Afeela also has an external widescreen. Sony is the car’s ‘Media Bar’, which will allow owners to display a variety of information, 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 Mobilitywith the media bar, he says, owners can “express” themselves by sharing different types of information with the people around them [the car].”
Sony also has less cool plans for this new media stick. During the CES exhibition, Sony ran the ad for a short time Spider-Man: No Way Home on the external screen. Not much else was said about this brief moment of the event, other than to suggest that Mizuno has been talking to partners about how they can create “fun and exciting” interactions using Sony’s media stick. It sounds like Sony wants Afeelas to be mobile billboards.
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Of course, all of this is still a few years away as Sony and Honda say the Afeela isn’t coming out until 2026. But as a tease of what to expect from future smart cars, it’s not looking good. Considering how ad-laden smart TVs are here in 2023, I’m also not looking forward to cars being covered in screens and commercials. I guess I’ll barely notice as I play a laggy PS5 game via the cloud in Afeela’s back seat. Anyway, I thought the future would be colder.
