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Sony is really good for building cars.
Written by: CH_ Chen Han
On January 5, at the CES 2022 International Consumer Electronics Show in the United States, Sony brought a pure electric prototype car, the VISION-S 02.
That's right, you read that right, and you didn't travel back to 2021, Sony Cars is here again, or at the International Consumer Electronics Show, or to release a prototype, the name is still VISION-S, and the same routine at last year's CES 2021.
What is different is that this time the car added "02", the model became an SUV, and the sedan VISION-S released last year was naturally renamed VISION-S 01. And, more importantly, Sony announced:
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Sony will set up an operating company called Sony Mobility Inc. in the spring of 2022 to explore the possibility of entering the electric vehicle market.
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01
Building a car? Or don't build cars?
Note that Sony wants to set up "Sony Mobility Inc.", not a car company, and to "explore the possibility of entering the electric vehicle market", not to determine the entry into the car market, revealing an ambiguous attitude between the lines.
In fact, as early as last January, after the release of the first prototype at CES 2021, Izumi Kawanishi, the project leader of Sony VISION-S, said in a media interview: "Sony will not become a car manufacturer, but is committed to becoming a promoter of change in the automotive industry", claiming that the prototype is just to show Sony's technology.
Does that sound familiar? The last company to say so, half a month ago, has launched a "secondary design, their own product planning and provide some key components, but not their own hand-made" brand of non-full new program hybrid model.
And in the past year, Sony is indeed very trustworthy, really no car, the automotive industry and Sony-related news is very little, the most recent time in the automotive industry to hear Sony, is the Weilai ET5 used 4 Sony 3 million pixels surround view dedicated camera.
It may be because it is impossible to find a suitable partner, it is impossible to find a suitable partner, or it may be stimulated by toyota and Honda's decision to fully electrify, a year later, Sony still can't help it.
Although Sony is still in a state of uncertainty, Sony wants to grasp the initiative in the tide of global automobile electrification and intelligence, and it is not possible to build a car.
(Sony 2020 financial report)
Sony is indeed quite suitable for car building, Sony's main business: games and network services, music, film and television, electronic products and solutions, imaging and sensing solutions and financial business, each of which can be combined with intelligent electric vehicles.
In particular, the imaging and sensing business is highly correlated with automobile assisted driving and automatic driving, while the video, audio and game business is the key to building a smart cockpit application ecology after the realization of automatic driving, and is the next important profit growth point of the automobile industry.
In the face of such a big opportunity, Sony has no reason not to be impressed.
Sony has enough strength and money to enter the automotive industry, but like the last technology company that said "don't build cars", Sony has the same wishful thinking.
Car manufacturing, including manufacturing and model pre-development is the largest and relatively unprofitable part of the automotive industry, it is better to provide only high-profit key components, sell software and solutions, it is best to monopolize sales channels, and only do the most profitable part.
However, they all ignore the fact that the automotive industry has much higher requirements for model design, planning and manufacturing than consumer electronics, and consumers should pay more attention to the car-making skills of car companies.
In such an environment, companies that have the ability to build good cars will not be easily manipulated and give up their profits, and the original companies that do not build good cars, you provide strong technology and advanced solutions, and you can't help seedlings and pull out a good product.
Technology companies want to grasp the right to speak in the automotive industry, there are only two ways, one is to choose a comprehensive self-made; the other is to cover the model design, research and development, production process, production process, quality system need to grasp their own, and then let the foundry in accordance with the specified process, process, quality standards to produce products.
02
What car is Sony going to build?
Therefore, I am sure that Sony will eventually build a car, and there is a high probability that it will choose the OEM model, because the frame part of the previously released VISION-S 01 concept car is Magna OEM.
So, what kind of car is Sony going to build? Let's start with a promotional video for VISION-S 02.
It can be seen that the two prototype cars released by Sony before and after have adopted a unified family design language, the whole vehicle line is relatively rounded, the front through LED light strip penetrates the willow leaf-shaped LED headlights, and the model LOGO is formed in the middle of the grille, and the chrome trim strips extending from the window line to the rear windshield divide the roof and body, and the appearance design is still very own.
The interior part is relatively flat, the black edge of the 3 consecutive screens through the style is too obvious, and the hidden air outlet, the knob-type gear shift mechanism and the touch screen under the center console are already very common design elements.
Fortunately, from the pictures and videos, we can still feel the efforts of the two prototype cars in terms of interior color matching and design refinement, Sony's product design and quality have always been more trustworthy, which I believe will continue in the car.
The VISION-S 02 positioned this time is a medium-sized pure electric SUV with a body size of 4895*1651*1930mm, a wheelbase of 3030mm, a minimum ground clearance of 157mm, and a body weight of 2040 kg.
In terms of power, the new car is equipped with two electric motors with a maximum power of 200 kW and a combined power of 400 kW to achieve four-wheel drive with a maximum speed of more than 180 km/h. In terms of chassis, the new car will use dual wishbones for independent suspension at the front and rear and will be equipped with air suspension. As for the battery life, Sony has not announced it for the time being.
The new car will offer a 4- or 7-seat layout with seat speakers with a three-dimensional spatial soundstage and a streaming service compatible with 360 live sound to provide an immersive music experience in the car. At the same time, it will also be equipped with the "BraviaCORE for VISION-S" digital video service, and the large screen in the car and the display screen behind each seat can play shared or exclusive video.
In the game part that countless players are looking forward to, VISION-S can play PlayStation games by remotely connecting to the game console at home, and can play online through the cloud.
In terms of smart driving, vision-S 02 will be equipped with up to 40 autonomous driving sensors, including 4 lidar, 18 cameras and 18 ultrasonic/millimeter wave radar. Based on Sony's dedicated CMOS image sensor, the cameras on the body can achieve high sensitivity, high dynamic range and LED traffic sign flicker mitigation.
With 360° full coverage of the body's sensing hardware, the VISION-S 02 enables L2+ level assisted driving functions, including automatic lane change, automatic evasion of pile barrels, automatic valet parking and more. Through software iteration, L4 level automatic driving function is expected to be realized in the future.
At the same time, the ToF camera in the VISION-S 02 monitors the driver's status in real time, determines the driver's attention and fatigue level through facial expressions and gestures, and issues an alert if necessary. The ToF camera can also adjust the temperature inside the car by inferring the occupant's state based on the read behavior. In addition, the car will also be equipped with a lip language system to improve the recognition of voice commands by the car machine in noisy situations.
On vision-S 02, Sony mainly emphasized 3 keywords: security, adaptability, and entertainment.
Safety: Safe and secure mobility, referring to comprehensive, sensitive sensors and high-end assisted driving capabilities;
Adaptability: closer to people, common growth, refers to the intelligent car experience;
Entertainment: The entertainment space that enriches mobility refers to the experience of games, movies and audio.
In order to emphasize safety and adaptability, Sony also demonstrated remote control technology similar to "Baidu Apollo 5G Cloud Driving". Through 5G, engineers can control the VISION-S 01 as far away as Germany in Japan for testing, and use Sony's own technology, communication knowledge and security technology accumulated in the development of smartphones to achieve low-latency transmission (video and control signals) and communication control (monitoring and prediction).
Sony has listed remote control as an important technology in the era of autonomous driving, and began 5G environmental driving tests in April 2021.
03
Sony makes a car, is it difficult?
It seems that Sony's two prototypes are very close to mass production, whether it is design, product planning or intelligent configuration considerations, these two cars are very mature.
However, no one has ever been able to do it overnight on the road of building a car, the automobile industry is huge and complex, and every novice must pay enough tuition to gain a foothold in the industry, even Sony is no exception.
The automotive industry does not believe that debut is the peak, and the accumulation of technology and experience is essential. Although Sony cars have many inherent advantages, which one to choose for OEM? How to ensure product quality? How are sales channels established? How to carry out after-sales service? Even at what pace should the publicity be carried out? How does the rapid iteration of the product take care of the feelings of old users? For Sony, these are the problems that will inevitably be faced on the road to car building.
Cars are so complex, how can it be simple to build a car. Any company that doesn't have a reverence for building a car will eventually pay the price.
Sony's indecisiveness today is a good thing, but it is not a good thing. On the one hand, it proves that it should foresee the difficulty of building a car, on the other hand, the opportunity is fleeting, Xiaomi car, Apple car are coming, if the car is used as the next smart terminal, Sony, which has repeatedly lost in the mobile phone market, may not have any advantage when encountering Apple and Xiaomi.
How should Sony's car-building road go? We will continue to pay attention.
Today's topic
Are you optimistic about Sony cars?
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