Sony-Honda is not any longer Afeelin’ it. This week, the Japanese three way partnership that for years had promised to convey a video-game sensibility to a digital-first electrical automobile was abruptly canceled. The 2 corporations snuffed out one automobile, the Afeela 1, that was first introduced three years in the past, and likewise halted work on one other mannequin beneath improvement.
Sony Honda Mobility (SHM) pinned the blame on Honda’s bigger EV pivot. Earlier this month, the automaker canceled its “0 Series” lineup of electrical autos after posting a $15.7 billion loss amid greater adjustments within the global EV market. Due to these shifts, the three way partnership wrote in a press launch, “SHM will be unable to make the most of sure applied sciences and property that had been initially deliberate to be offered by Honda.”
Reservation holders will get full refunds, the corporate stated, and “discussions” about the way forward for the Sony-Honda partnership “will proceed.” So the PlayStation-first automobile of everybody’s desires should still be far forward on the horizon, possibly.
The Afeela, although, was a bizarre match from the beginning. Let’s put apart the odd title and its cornucopia of related pun alternatives. (We’ll settle for late-breaking submissions within the feedback.) For one factor, the Afeela 1’s launch was interminable.
Sony first introduced its precursor, then referred to as the Imaginative and prescient-S, again in 2020. The Afeela itself was the star of the Sony-Honda present at CES 4 consecutive instances. A “close to manufacturing” refined prototype made an look in Las Vegas simply this past January. However by then, the entire idea felt a bit stale. A “pc on wheels” was form of novel in 2020; now, a “software-defined automobile” is the assumed place to begin for each new automobile.
{Photograph}: Tristan deBrauwere
The automobile’s specs, as soon as introduced in 2025, didn’t do the model any favors. The Afeela 1 was an electrical sedan within the US market, the place electrical SUVs are the popular profile. It had an estimated vary of 300 miles, piddling in comparison with different new luxurious EVs just like the Lucid Air (420 miles), the Mercedes-Benz EQS (390 miles), and the Rivian R1 (410 miles). On that luxurious level: The Afeela 1’s $90,000 worth made it significantly uncompetitive-feeling as different automakers stored saying new models. The Afeela 1 was slated for debut in late 2026, however just for consumers in California.
It’s an open query whether or not the Afeela 1’s entertainment selling point is one thing customers need or want from a automobile proper now. The sedan’s promised autonomous driving capabilities had been speculated to be imminent, and so the automobile was stuffed to maintain all nondrivers good and distracted: screens on the sprint and in entrance of passenger seats; built-in PlayStation Remote Play; visible “themes”; tons of in-car apps. True self-driving performance, although, has but to come back to non-public vehicles. Do individuals actually need to sit of their stationary autos and recreation? Now it’s a query for the farther-off future.
However Sony-Honda’s best problem might have been America’s stop-start approach to electric vehicles. Shopper uptake of battery-powered vehicles has stalled because the US federal authorities cut support for each EV-curious prospects and people assembling EVs and their elements in American factories. BloombergNEF, which estimated in 2024 that EVs would account for almost half of recent US automobile gross sales in 2030, reduced its projection to 27 p.c final 12 months—a minimize of 14 million automobile gross sales.
Honda, already a late-bloomer within the EV area, clearly doesn’t consider that it’s price spending gobs of cash proper now to meet up with the business’s battery-powered leaders. The unhappy story of the Afeela, then, might be a C-plot within the darker story of the US EV market. We’re Afeelin’ blue, too.
