At CES 2022, Sony unveiled its second concept car, the Vision-S 02 SUV, while Sony Chairman, President and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida announced that Sony Group will set up a new division, Sony Mobility Inc., which is expected to be officially established this spring to focus on the commercialization of electric vehicles. Vision-S 02 is built by Sony's artificial intelligence team and robotics team... Could Sony's operations open up the direction of a new electric vehicle company?
Note: The matter of building a car, Dyson walked a round and did not go down.
Figure 1 Sony's two Vision S concept cars
Part 1: The highlights of the Vision S series
Sony Vision-S is a series of concept cars led by Sony's artificial intelligence team and robotics team (Aibo, the robot dog product), and is pulled by a bunch of other companies to do it, including NVIDIA, Qualcomm, ZF, Bosch (many components), BlackBerry, QNX, Conti (a large number of development ECUs), BENTELER (chassis and battery), Magna (the entire EE design) and so on. The biggest feature of this series is the deployment of a complete sensor suite for high-end autonomous driving inside and outside the Vision-S body, with the aim of providing panoramic images, 360 sound effects, full-time connectivity and other features.
The 40 sensors on sony vision include—
16 Cameras – 8 external cameras, namely 4 for surround view (IMX390), 2 for side rear cameras (IMX390*2)+, 2 for side view (IMX490*2); 8 for the interior, respectively, two forward-looking stereo cameras (IMX490*2), two ToF cameras (IMX456*2), driver monitoring*1, driving record*1, rear camera and 1 internal electronics;
and 18 ultrasonic/radar sensors and 4 LiDAR sensors.
Figure 2 Sensor distribution of Sony Vision-S
The Sony Vision-S prototype has been publicly tested in Austria. Logically, this is a technical demonstration of all involved in the construction of the entire system, around 5G technology, many perceived electronic technologies can be used to achieve high-speed, high-capacity and low-latency connections between the in-vehicle system and the cloud. That is, through Sony, the partners will also develop VIsion-S into an entertainment space on the basis of mobility, and the most important thing for Sony is the need for a display channel to reflect Sony's advantages in content, game experience and audio. Through the exploration of VIsion-S, and through the partners who support these actions, we have learned more about this direction.
Carefully studying Sony's business composition, we find that Sony has become a company around game consoles, content (music + movies), and our traditional understanding of Sony's main electronic products now accounts for less than 1/4 of the business, and image sensor CIS has become a very important piece of business.
Figure 3 Business composition of Sony FY21 Q2
That is, the VIsion-S concept car project, which is part of the Electronics Products & Solutions division, is now a separate business unit. In this sense, Sony is different from Apple today — Apple can keep throwing money around Apple Car (apple is said to have recently allocated a lot of resources to AR and metaverse). Sony must have burned money like Dyson, what did he do to set up this business unit?
Figure 4 Sony's concept car belongs to a small division
Part 2: Sony's CIS and LiDAR
A big part of Sony's Tech Day is lidar:
Figure 5 Sony's lidar video
And most importantly, Sony's current CIS business has a very low proportion of cars. That is to say, Sony's image sensor CIS part, in the development of new business, is still limited to the use of Japanese car companies, Sony is to use through the demand for ADAS, can play their advantages in the field of mobility.
Figure 6 Sony's prediction of CIS in the post-pandemic era
In the Vision S series, the most used (the most core) is the camera, these things can be used as a showcase for global automotive companies to surpass ON Semiconductor in this segment.
Figure 7 Sony's dominant area CIS has not yet been done in the car
Figure 8 Sony's image sensor application in the automotive field
And once you have this platform, in various businesses and content, you can find and partners, especially the direct needs of OEMs that Sony is less exposed to, I personally judge that this is the focus - to do a car company yourself, it is really not worth the loss.
Figure 9 Image sensor used in cars, Sony started late
brief summary:
My personal judgment is that it is difficult for startup car companies to emerge in Europe and Japan except for China and the United States, and there are no so-called software giants in these two places, and it is difficult for Dyson and Sony to enter the automotive industry with companies that do this product. I think Sony's next step is to open the analysis of the ADAS camera and automotive CIS market, which may work better.
Figure | network and related screenshots
About author:Zhu Yulong, senior electric vehicle three-electric system and automotive electronics engineer, author of "Automotive Electronics Hardware Design".
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