From life-like games, music, film and television business, to more professional audio, imaging, mobile communications, semiconductor business... Sony Group Co., Ltd. can be said to have contracted every aspect of contemporary digital life.
As a technology company, sony group's 76-year history is almost a history of global digital technology development. This is also why among Z generation consumers, there will be such an obsessive electronic belief as "Sony Dafa is good".
Today, this belief may soon be infiltrating the automotive sector.
At CES 2022 two days ago, Sony brought a new all-electric concept car VISION-S 02 and officially announced the creation of a new division , Sony Mobility Inc," said Kenichiro Yoshida: "We are exploring the commercialization of Sony electric vehicles. ”
For a time, the soup powder circle and the car circle exploded again.
Why do you say "again"? Because Sony's involvement in the automotive field is not a matter of a day or two, as early as CES 2020, Sony has already disclosed the first concept car VISION-S. But at the time, vision-S project leaders said Sony would not become a carmaker.
Now that two years have passed, the new concept car has arrived, and the travel company has been established, does it mean that Sony has punched himself in the face and wants to build the car himself? The author remains skeptical about this issue.
01 After two years of re-issuing concept cars, Sony is not talking about cars after all
The melon-eating masses may feel that Sony has even built two concept cars, is this still not going to go down to build a car? Before answering this question, let's take a look at what Sony's press conference said.
It can be clearly seen from Sony's official press release that the three key words of Sony's concept car are: safety, adaptability, and entertainment.
The key word in safety is sensors: the VISION-S is surrounded by multiple sensors, including high-sensitivity, high-resolution, wide dynamic range CMOS image sensors and lidar sensors that can accurately perceive 3D space.
The key word for adaptability is communication technology: VISION-S's vehicle settings, keylocks and user settings can be synchronized by connecting the vehicle to the cloud via mobile communication technology, including 5G communication technology with low latency, high capacity and high speed. In addition, low-latency transmission (video and control signals) and communication control (monitoring and forecasting) can be achieved through 5G using on-board telematics systems.
On the entertainment side, as everyone understands, it is a combination of Sony AV products and game console upgrades, including the creation of seat speakers for a three-dimensional spatial sound field, the fully integrated digital video service function "Bravia CORE for VISION-S", the ability to remotely connect to the game console in the home, the ability to remotely connect to the game console in the home...
Regarding the new car, Sony talks about its own sensors, communication technology and infotainment products, but the core electrical architecture of pure electric vehicles is never mentioned.
From the 2020 report on VISION-S, we can know that the reason why Sony did not mention electrical technology is because vision-S's pure electric platform is not sony original, but jointly designed by Sony and Magna (to put it bluntly, Magna OEM). Moreover, in addition to the platform, vision-S vehicles are also jointly built by NVIDIA, Qualcomm, ZF, Bosch, Continental, BlackBerry, Mapai, Benteler and other well-known auto parts suppliers.
In addition, the key to making People more unconvinced of Sony's next car is that since the development of concept models before 2020, Sony has undoubtedly accumulated enough experience in automotive products, and the two concept cars brought today are also extremely complete, basically reaching the level of mass production, but Sony does not mention the product positioning, price range, target group, and mass production plan of the usual car conference.
It can be seen that Sony either has not decided whether to mass-produce or does not intend to be a mass-produced vehicle manufacturer at all.
As Sony's official website said, "will seriously consider launching electric vehicles on the market", how long this "serious consideration" will have to wait, and where the final choice will go, is still vague and unknown.
02 From CMOS to autonomous driving, the new gameplay of the leading Sony
But didn't Kenichiro Yoshida say "we are exploring the commercialization of Sony electric vehicles"? How can we achieve commercialization without being an oem?
In fact, for Sony, building a complete vehicle is not the only way to commercialize electric vehicles. At CES 2020, Yoshida said, "As a global leader in CMOS sensors, what do we feel we should do in the field of autonomous driving?" ”
Yoshida does not exaggerate, Sony is indeed the leader in the field of CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductors) sensors, which once occupied more than 50% of the global market share, and although it fell to 40% in 2020 due to the impact of the epidemic, it is still the leader in the field.
The CMOS image sensor is the technical key for autopilot technology manufacturers such as Tesla that adopt a pure vision solution.
At present, Sony's CMOS products are mainly oriented to the field of smart phones, but in the face of the gradually saturated mobile phone market, IT is difficult to achieve a breakthrough increase in CMOS demand, and the arrival of smart cars, especially the development of visual self-driving technology, has undoubtedly opened up a new business idea for Sony.
In addition to Sony, Qualcomm, also a smartphone semiconductor giant, also said at CES that they are trying to seek business opportunities in the increasingly advanced and popular field of autonomous driving, and have released a number of new products combined with semiconductors for autonomous vehicles in the past two years.
Sony, which has been conspiring for a long time, said that it would step into deep autonomous driving as early as CES 2018, and for the first time revealed that the on-board image sensor is the strategic path "car eye".
At that time, Sony bluntly said that the company's idea is to take the image sensor as the core, promote the upgrading and iteration of the "car eye" in the field of regulation and sensing, so as to contribute to the comprehensive development and popularization of automatic driving, and put forward the safety vision of "Safety Cocoon".
At CES 2020, Sony officials admitted that their own image sensors and radar sensors have been gradually integrated, and helped Toyota and Lexus to achieve excellent results in JNCAP's self-driving night pedestrian emergency braking test.
In the two most recent concept cars unveiled at present, Sony has broken the record for the number of smart car sensors. Vision-S 01 is equipped with 33 sensors, vision-S 02 has reached 40, and they are Sony's most advanced products such as IMX390, IMX456, IMX490 and so on. There is also a time-of-flight (ToF) sensor inside the car that can read "lip language" and body language.
In contrast, the Xiaopeng P5, which currently has the most sensors on sale in the industry, has only 32, and the Tesla Model 3 has only 8 cameras and 12 sensors.
Although the technology has not yet achieved mass production, sony has achieved a considerable accumulation in the field of automatic driving from the perspective of the technological maturity of the two concept cars.
Previously, PwC had pointed out that the market size of autonomous driving technology in China, the United States and Europe will expand to $187.8 billion in 2025, reaching 2.3 times that of 2020. On the other hand, data from the US research company IDC shows that global smartphone shipments are expected to be 1.48 billion units in 2023, an increase of only 1.1% over 2018.
Therefore, in the current environment of a red sea in the mobile phone market, cutting into the autonomous driving track through image sensor hardware will become a key channel for Sony to expand its automotive business and achieve new revenue growth points.
03 Build the whole vehicle, or become the second Huawei?
As Sony officials say, Sony will set up an operating company called Sony Mobility Inc. in the spring of 2022. The company's businesses include VISION-S, which contributes to the evolution of mobility, the autonomous entertainment robot aibo, and the drone Airpeak, and Sony will create value in a richer range of areas.
The so-called mobility companies are not limited to the whole vehicle. In the description of the company's purpose and business, more emphasis is placed on AI, robotics and mobility evolution. It can be seen that the whole vehicle is not the core of Sony's business, and the upgradable and iterative technology is their key competitiveness.
In the current smart car market, the most similar enterprises to Sony should belong to Huawei.
Huawei officials have said that Huawei does not build cars, focuses on ICT technology, and helps car companies build good cars. Sony also said: the company is committed to the research and development of autonomous driving technology, VISION-S is only to show the technology, Sony will not become a car manufacturer, but is committed to becoming a promoter of change in the automotive industry.
The response of the outside world to the company's car construction is surprisingly logically consistent. Moreover, in the manufacture of the two concept cars currently unveiled, Sony's role is also very similar to huawei's role in the Q&A M5. Both are led by technology-enabled product development, and the production of car bodies such as chassis bodies, Sony handed over to parts suppliers, and Huawei handed over to "foundry" Xiaokang.
At this point, we still can't determine whether Sony will personally build a car, but we can judge with a high probability that whether Sony builds the car himself or not, it will eventually enter the automotive industry as a supplier of intelligent car incremental components like Huawei.
Thinking about it carefully, in the current environment where the competition for new forces in the global market is becoming increasingly fierce, the incremental space for vehicle products to achieve development has become more and more narrow, but key supply chain enterprises such as power batteries and chips can achieve greater breakthroughs in the B-end market and capital market.
Moreover, starting from Sony itself, the high cost and large-scale heavy industry manufacturing model behind vehicle manufacturing are not in line with Sony's tonality as a high-tech company.
Therefore, becoming a supplier of smart automotive components should be the best choice for Sony to enter the automotive industry.