Sony-Honda Mobility is serious about making an electric vehicle. It has a real product, that I’ve sat in. It has the full might of Honda’s EV hub in Marysville, Ohio behind it. There’s an AI assistant, PlayStation integration and a suite of driver-assistance systems. The Sony-Honda Afeela 1 has everything you’d expect from a modern electric sedan.
There’s just one thing missing: A reason to buy it.
(Welcome to another installment of Power Moves, a column on the winners and losers of the EV transition. I’ll break down what’s happening, why you should care and who’s going to come out on top.)
Try as I might, I couldn’t find one. After sitting down for a half-hour virtual interview with Sony-Honda Mobility (SHM) President and Chief Operating Officer Izumi Kawanishi, I have more concerns than ever about this project.
The luxury EV market is a gunfight these days. Instead of anteing up, Sony-Honda Mobility (SHM) is trying to explain why its pocket knife is the sharpest.
Specs That Don’t Stand Out
“From a strictly business point of view, it would have been a good idea to go with an SUV first,” SHM President Izumi Kawanishi admits via a translator.
I agree. The electric luxury full-size sedan segment is tiny in the U.S., and already has a whopping seven contenders, six of which come from household-name brands. The Afeela 1 arrives late to this segment, with specs that put it near the bottom of the class.
Gallery: Sony-Honda Afeela 1 CES 2025
The Afeela 1 will be powered by two 241-hp electric motors, one at each axle. But since you can’t just combine peak motor outputs to get the combined figure, we expect the final number to be somewhere in the low 400-hp range. It’ll go 300 miles on a charge, and fast-charge at up to 150 kW using a Tesla-style North American Charging Standard (NACS) port.
Hands-on Level 2 highway-driving assistance will be available, with conditional eyes-off Level 3 autonomy reportedly coming later. But if you want an electric sedan that can go further than 300 miles on a charge, offers Level 2 highway driving assistance, over 150 kW of charging power and more than 500 horsepower, take your pick. All seven competitors offer the same. Mercedes even has Level 3 conditional highway autonomy available today on the EQS Sedan (albeit in limited locations), and Lucid will sell you an electric sedan that goes over 500 miles on a charge.
The Afeela 1 comes from a brand no one knows, without an established distribution network, at a time when sedan sales are cratering and the original hype around EVs has subsided. It arrives long after the legacy automakers and upstarts have already come to market, with middling specs and a higher price tag than the Tesla or Lucid.
With all of that working against it, surely the Afeela 1 must have some killer selling point. Some reason that this isn’t a fool’s errand. The company must have some proof that Sony and Honda aren’t spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a road to nowhere.
Sony-Honda’s Justification
I noted to Kawanashi that the Afeela 1’s competitors are faster, more powerful, with quicker charging, more range and, in some cases, lower prices. When you have no established foothold in the market, that sounds like a losing argument. How do you compete?
Kawanishi noted that while the Afeela 1 isn’t cheap, it also includes many features as standard, which is a fair point against German manufacturers that tend to nickel and dime you on options. As for why you’d choose the Afeela, though, the argument was less compelling.
“In comparison to Tesla, we did listen to some of our comments from users to get feedback. And one of the things we included in our model is access to Tesla’s charger network. So that does answer some of the criticism about charging speed,” Kawanishi said. “Specifically, one thing that we do provide compared to other rival automakers is the quality of our craftsmanship, specifically within the car.”
Given that all competitors should have access to Tesla Superchargers by 2026, and that Sony’s claimed maximum charging speed is at the bottom of its class, I put no stock in that argument. The craftsmanship angle is more compelling, but after sitting in the Afeela it’s hard to argue that Sony-Honda has a slam dunk there. It felt well-built, but the sparse interior and screen-heavy design felt like a minimalist redux of, well, every other EV sedan on sale. A BMW, Mercedes, Audi or Porsche feels far nicer inside, and looks more impressive too.
It also has to do this without an established retail network, as the Afeela 1 won't be sold through dealers, at least initially. Sony-Honda will only offer it in California at first, further shrinking the potential buyer pool. It won't sell on specs, and it won't sell on availability.
So we arrive at Sony-Honda Mobility’s last line of defense: A lead in technology. Which the company may or may not have.
AI, Autonomy and Other Buzzwords
Core to Sony-Honda’s argument seems to be a real or perceived lead in automated driver assistance systems (ADAS). Representatives from the company noted that the car has 40 sensors. It’s the second thing mentioned on the pre-order site, too. I guess 40 is a lot. They tell me one is LiDAR, which, as sensors go, is a very good one. Yet SHM’s claimed advantage here seems mostly based on counting sensors.
Installing those sensors is easy. Creating a system that can integrate 40 sensors and make safe, confident driving decisions on the fly is much tougher. Multi-billion dollar companies exist to do only that. While no one should discount Honda’s manufacturing expertise when it comes to building the Afeela 1, it’s also no secret that building a great self-driving car is a very elusive proposition for nearly all automakers. Tesla has been promising autonomy “next year” for going on 10 years, three years longer than Sony and Honda have even been working together. China’s automakers are untested but are clearly advancing quickly in this field, and arguably more so than the rest of the world. It’s not clear whether Sony-Honda will get the benefits of Honda’s existing Level 3 experience in Japan—the line between the companies is murky—but even if it does, Honda is far from the top of its class in ADAS. Even Kawanishi can’t explain why Sony-Honda will be able to offer better ADAS than its more experienced competitors.
“When it comes to the realm of [this] technology, it’s not something that any manufacturer can just jump in and succeed in,” Kawanishi admitted. He said that it’s true that companies like Tesla, or some Chinese manufacturers may be a little more advanced in terms of actual autonomous driving technology. Still, Sony’s experience gives them one benefit.
“One part where we have an advantage [over] other manufacturers is that when the driver is not actually handling the steering wheel” and they need something else to do, he said. “Specifically, entertainment[...] That’s something [where] we are very, very strong.”
Good news, then. The cart’s all finished. We’ll find a horse later.
Perhaps Sony-Honda does not have an advantage in driver assistance, then, or at least not one that will materialize until true autonomous driving is already available in the car. The Afeela’s support for PlayStation games and the Crunchyroll streaming service are certainly nice touches when you’re stuck at a charging spot or, in theory, driving autonomously. Sure, Tesla’s Netflix app may beat Ridevu handily, but PS5 game streaming crushes any glorified mobile game you can play on your Model 3.
I’m not convinced, however, that buyers who want to play Playstation 5 games and watch anime in their car and buyers who can spend $90,000 on a car are the same people. And since competitors are beating Sony-Honda to the punch on hands-free and even eyes-free driving, selling on ADAS features and stationary entertainment options alone seems unlikely.
Sony’s primary tech advantage, then, can only be explained the way any hungry company in 2025 explains its own credibility: The mystical power of A.I.
“Users are able to carry out conversations with the voice agent using AI to customize for the individual user,” Kawanishi said. He added that the AI technology “makes the car more interactive,” and reiterated that it could customize the car as you go. It can recommend songs to you, too, he said. Though it will recommend a song to play via your streaming habits on the car’s Amazon Music or Spotify apps, both of which have their own, custom recommendation engines.
But Kawanishi’s broad description is essentially what everyone else is promising with in-car AI. Custom. Personalized. Adaptive. But pressed for details, no one seems to have a more compelling use case than suggesting navigation destinations, changing the car’s interior lighting or recommending entertainment. Mercedes has already implemented ChatGPT support, which is silly, given that you can’t exactly code or write while driving. But it’s also launching a Google Gemini-powered "Conversational Navigation," which can parse complicated routing directives like “Find me an Italian restaurant with gluten-free options and charging nearby.” That sounds quite useful. Volkswagen supports ChatGPT, too. The next generation of BMW iDrive will have similar AI-powered customization as well. Hell, even Honda’s own EV has an AI assistant that is “conversational,” and can, uh, change the lights.
In the short demo I got of the Afeela 1’s in-car AI system, the operator said “Hi Afeela,” to which it replied, “Ok, I’ll call you Ophelia.” Sony’s cutting-edge AI failed to recognize its own name, then continued calling the operator “Ophelia” for the rest of the demo. Then the very kind and enthusiastic Sony-Honda employee asked the car to “make the theme more Japanese,” and I was professional enough not to laugh.
The Afeela 1 took it seriously, too, and set the display background to an image from the PlayStation samurai game Ghost of Tsushima. He then mentioned he was at CES, and the car asked how he was enjoying it. So if you want a car that can make the cabin more Japanese on a whim, and feign interest in your life by asking banal follow-up questions, I suppose you’ve found your match. For the rest of us, Sony-Honda has few answers.
How Can Sony-Honda Fix This?
The people I talked to at Sony-Honda Mobility were smart, dedicated professionals. Kawanishi is a serious executive with a passion for this, and that came through in our conversation. The company is marketing the car. It’s listening to feedback. It wants to succeed. More importantly, neither company wants to get left behind by China’s automakers, which are absolutely smoking the rest of the world when it comes to EV technology and software integration. This feels like the plan to try and catch up.
But launching a whole new car company—even one that takes advantage of Honda’s own factory—is a punishing operation. The game is too crowded and capital-intensive for also-rans to get a foothold. Latecomers best come correct, with new ideas, better execution, lower prices or, ideally, all three.
The Sony-Honda Mobility Afeela 1 is not a fresh concept. It does not appear to be better executed than its existing, established, trusted competitors. It does not move the ball forward on EV design, efficiency or value. Its sole raison d'etre seems to be its claimed leads in “craftsmanship” and “technology,” but we haven’t seen compelling evidence of either here.
Maybe its AI assistant will be a decade ahead of others, demonstrating unspeakable competency in a field where neither Sony nor Honda has had a major impact so far. Maybe Sony-Honda will solve autonomy and shock the world. But if the company cannot utterly trounce its competition in either metric, the rest of the Afeela 1 is simply not compelling enough.
At least in 2025’s prototype form, the car is good enough in a segment that demands greatness, arriving at a time when the easy money has been swept from the table.
Contact the author: Mack.hogan@insideevs.com.
