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Sony Honda no Longer I feel. This week, the Japanese joint venture that has promised for years to bring a video game sensibility to a digital-first electric car It was suddenly cancelled. The two companies extinguished one vehicle Avila 1It was first announced three years ago, and work on another model under development has been halted.
Sony Honda Mobility (SHM) has put the blame on Honda’s larger pivot to electric vehicles. Earlier this month, the automaker It canceled the “0 Series” lineup. Electric cars after recording a loss of $15.7 billion amid greater changes in the electric car market Global electric vehicle market. Because of these transitions, the joint venture wrote in a press release, “SHM will not be able to leverage some of the technologies and assets that were originally intended to be provided by Honda.”
The company said reservation holders will receive full refunds, and “discussions” will continue about the future of the partnership between Sony and Honda. So the first PlayStation car that everyone dreams of may still be far on the horizon.
But Afeela was an odd fit from the start. Let’s put aside the strange name and the abundance of pun opportunities associated with it. (We’ll accept recent entries in the comments.) For one thing, Afeela 1’s release has been interminable.
Sony first announced its precursor, then called Vision-S, in 2020. Afeela itself has been the star of Sony-Honda’s show at CES four times in a row. A “close to production” iteration of the prototype has just appeared in Las Vegas Last January. But by then, the whole concept seemed a bit outdated. “Computer on Wheels” was a novel in 2020; Now the “software-defined vehicle” is the default starting point for every new car.
Photo: Tristan Debrauer
The car’s specifications, announced in 2025, haven’t done the brand any favors. The Afeela 1 was an electric sedan for the US market, where electric SUVs are the look of choice. It had an estimated range of 300 miles, which is paltry compared to other new luxury electric cars like the Clear air (420 miles) Mercedes-Benz EQS (390 miles), and Rivian R1 (410 miles). On that luxury point: The Afeela 1’s $90,000 price tag made it feel particularly uncompetitive as other automakers kept advertising New models. The Afeela 1 was scheduled to debut in late 2026, but only for buyers in California.
It’s an open question whether the Afeela 1’s Entertainment selling point It is something consumers want or need from a car right now. The sedan’s promised self-driving capabilities were assumed to be imminent, so the car was packed to keep all non-drivers nice and distracted: screens on the dashboard and in front of the passenger seats; Built-in PlayStation remote play; Visual “themes”; Tons of in-car applications. However, true self-driving functionality has not yet reached personal cars. Do people really want to sit in their stationary cars and play games? Now it’s a question of the distant future.
But perhaps the biggest challenge Sony-Honda faced was that America was out of business Approach to electric cars. Consumer interest in battery-powered cars has stopped since the formation of the US federal government Support cut For both customers interested in electric vehicles and those who assemble EVs and their components in US factories. BloombergNEF, which estimated in 2024 that electric vehicles would account for nearly half of new vehicle sales in the United States in 2030, She lowered her expectations to 27 percent last year, i.e. reducing car sales by 14 million cars.
Honda, which was already a latecomer to electric vehicles, clearly doesn’t think it’s worth spending large sums of money right now to catch up with the battery-powered industry leaders. So perhaps the tale of the sad maid is a type C plot in the darker story From the American electric vehicle market. We feel blue too.