March 4 is a day to remember for fans of Sony and Honda, two "Dafa". The two companies announced a series of negotiations and cooperation to establish a joint venture in 2022 to launch a "high value-added pure electric vehicle" and provide a series of mobility services in the future.
The two companies said in a statement that the new joint venture will combine Honda's vehicle development and manufacturing experience, channel capabilities and Sony's image sensing, software algorithms, infotainment and electrical and electronic technologies. Sony is responsible for building the mobility service platform, honda is responsible for vehicle manufacturing, and finally going on sale in 2025.
Senior executives also said the upcoming joint venture was "open" and that other companies could join it. Sony is also looking forward to promoting its electrical platform, hardware and content to more car companies.
From Xiaomi to Huawei, the roadmap of "Japan's new forces"
Sony and Honda's cooperation has taken the classic route of our "second batch of new car-making forces", a similar case is the IM zhiji cooperated by SAIC and Alibaba, and it is also a form of "traditional automobile enterprises" and "digital enterprises with consumer electronics and intelligent hardware manufacturing, and audio-visual entertainment content" to pay for technology together. It can be said that this joint venture company is the first new car-making force in Japan in the true sense.
Attention is "in the true sense".
Entering "Japan's new car-making forces" into the search engine, almost all the results point to Sony, after all, sony Vision-S 01 concept cars were released before the epidemic. This year's CES 2022 Sony not only brought the second concept car Vision-S 02, but also established Sony Mobility to operate the mobility business. Two concept cars that look highly completed are enough to show that Sony's car research and development is faster than the progress of a car company that "puts CG on road test video".
A company that has never built a car can quickly come up with a concept car, and the support of professional forces is indispensable behind it. In the case of the Vision-S 01, Sony is more responsible for the intelligent cockpit, intelligent assisted driving software and hardware and the electronic architecture of the whole vehicle, while the body, suspension and three electrics are handed over to Magna. Everyone who pays attention to the car can find this name in the B-pillar nameplate of the Mercedes-Benz Big G, the factory wall of the Pole Fox Car, and the strange text of "Toyota Supra sold a loss of 160,000".
From the combination of "digital enterprise + professional OEM" to today's "digital enterprise + traditional car enterprise", the combination represents Sony's car-making route from the "Xiaomi mode" of full link opening and enterprise All-in to the "Huawei model" that specializes in intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving, electrical architecture and its software and hardware, and is responsible for automobile manufacturing and sales by car companies. What will motivate Sony and Honda's top brass to start contacting at the end of last year and eventually form this memorandum?
The "Xiaomi model" that Sony may have originally chosen has a significant advantage: the automotive division has a lot of imagination in the capital market. If it can be listed independently, the stock price of the new car-making force enterprises in 2020-2021 will be of great help to the market value of the parent company. But correspondingly, according to the positioning of the Vision-S 01 concept car, the cost and R& D resources occupied by Sony's single-handed car manufacturing will be higher than that of Xiaomi, which announced the car last year, and it is necessary to solve the two major problems of supply chain and channels from scratch. The time node for finally achieving breakeven will also be later than that of similar new power companies with lower positioning and winning by volume.
In contrast, choosing to join hands with traditional car companies and "half a step backwards" as a joint venture and becoming a Tier 1 supplier of the "Huawei model" is more feasible in 2022 - from vehicle hardware design to manufacturing to channels, completed by more experienced car companies, Sony itself only needs to extend the "comfort zone" to the car. In the future, whether there are new car companies joining the joint venture company or supporting other car companies, Sony will have more space. From this point of view, Sony has not completely copied the "Huawei model" of being responsible for automotive hardware and mastering sales channels.
For various reasons, Sony, at least temporarily, parted ways with Magna and instead joined hands with Japanese car companies. What will be the result of the cooperation between the two "Dafa"?
Imagine 2025
With Honda's support in design and production, this still unknown new force car manufacturer will not have a research and development speed comparable to that of the new forces from 0 to 1. Referring to the domestic new forces car manufacturers, after the 2-3 year research and development cycle, the joint venture between Sony and Honda can complete the research and development of new cars; and considering that the new car will be listed in 2025, 2024 should be the time node for the appearance and hardware of this electric vehicle to freeze. We might as well speculate on the new Sony-Honda car.
In October last year, Honda released the pure electric sub-brand e:N and launched the Architecture W pure electric platform, and three e:N concept cars based on the Architecture W platform will be mass-produced no later than 2025. With Honda's production vehicles sharing development and manufacturing costs and reducing R&D risks, Architecture W will be the best hardware foundation for new joint venture cars.
In order to fully demonstrate Sony's smart cockpit, assisted driving sensing hardware and algorithm advantages to attract more OEMs, Sony will need to "pile up" on the car - multi-screen smart cockpit, lidar and high-definition cameras, as well as the E/E architecture developed by Sony need to be loaded, which requires a higher carrier (shou) position (jia), Architecture W is more malleable.
Based on Magna's plan at the beginning of 2020, Sony's two concept cars are about 4.9m in length, have a wheelbase of more than 3m, and a total of 400kW (544PS) with dual motors, and the Vision-S 01 can accelerate 4.8s from 100 kilometers and weigh 2.5 tons. Two years later, these indicators have a lot of room for improvement. In addition, an electric vehicle for the 2025 market should have at least 650-800km (WLTP) range, which is probably the case for the part that Honda is responsible for.
Back at Sony, a company that produces hardware such as TVs, smartphones, mirrorless cameras, game consoles, and other hardware, as well as operates gaming and music platforms, it's not hard to imagine that everything will fit into the smart cockpit. But you may not know that Sony is also the world's fourth largest patentee for VR/AR device inventions since 2020. After precipitation, will the metacostem concept have an impact on smart devices and even cars? Will there be killer applications in the automotive sector? The imagination space of this car is also very large.
According to the judgment of the head of the new force enterprise on the relationship between advanced auxiliary driving and intelligent cockpit, adding so many "non-driving" functions must require strong enough auxiliary driving ability to liberate the driver from driving behavior. At this time, looking back at the Vision-S 01 in early 2020, we found that Sony had already begun to "roll" hardware: 4 lidar, 6 millimeter-wave radar and a full 18 cameras, how to see how to see the configuration that was piled up two years later (in fact, there are not many until now). The Vision-S 01 claims high-speed navigation assisted driving and fully automatic parking capabilities, which were quite rare in January 2020.
Car companies that launched urban road auxiliary driving capabilities this year will launch automatic driving functions close to L4 by 2025; the "14th Five-Year Plan" National Informatization Plan proposes the goal of achieving advanced automatic driving applications above L3 level by 2025, which also indicates to us the general level of assisted driving systems at that time.
What is certain is that Sony and Honda must expand the functional boundaries of today's assisted driving systems, expanding new scenarios for assisted driving in urban areas, unlabeled roads and even the wild; they also have to work on computing platforms, algorithms, and road running data.
pursue
New forces in China and the United States continue to introduce new products and concepts, while european traditional car companies and suppliers quickly follow up, But Japan has not moved. Even if the auto giant Toyota comes up with 15 electric vehicles that will be put into production in one go, it has not calmed down the discussion that the Japanese auto industry has not caught up. From cockpit intelligence and applications to assisted driving, in-vehicle computing platforms, and electrical architectures, Japanese cars lack impressive results.
We may have to wait for 2026-2028 to say whether the cooperation between the two "Dafa" companies will be successful or unsuccessful. If they succeed, it will be a good inspiration for Japanese OEMs, suppliers and technology companies. Sony's cooperation with Honda may not change the overall status quo of the Japanese automotive industry, but it is also a meaningful attempt.
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