Announced last week at CES 2023, Sony and Honda’s new prototype smart car seems to take a page from Elon Musk’s Tesla, allowing people to launch PlayStation 4 and 5 games through its interior 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 (electric vehicle) from Sony and Honda, is a joint venture between the two major companies designed to leverage both Sony’s advanced technology and Honda’s decades of car manufacturing. 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, assuming you have a decent signal or one 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 an odd future episode of a Pimp My Ride reboot, the Afeela also features an external 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 Mobility, says the media bar allows owners to “express themselves by sharing different types of information with people around them [the car].”
CES/Sony/Honda
Sony also has some not-so-cool plans for this new media bar. During its CES presentation, Sony briefly showed 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.
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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. Considering how ad-supported smart TVs are already in 2023, I’m not looking forward to cars getting covered in screens and ads, too. I think I’ll hardly notice it when I’m playing a sluggish PS5 game over the cloud in the backseat of the Afeela. Anyway, I thought the future would be cooler.