Sony-Honda is not any longer Afeelin’ it. This week, the Japanese three way partnership that for years had promised to deliver a video-game sensibility to a digital-first electrical automotive was abruptly canceled. The 2 firms snuffed out one car, 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 Sequence” lineup of electrical autos after posting a $15.7 billion loss amid greater adjustments within the international EV market. Due to these shifts, the three way partnership wrote in a press launch, “SHM won’t be able to make the most of sure applied sciences and property that have been initially deliberate to be supplied 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 automotive of everybody’s goals should be far forward on the horizon, possibly.
The Afeela, although, was a bizarre match from the beginning. Let’s put apart the odd identify and its cornucopia of related pun alternatives. (We are going to 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 previous January. However by then, the entire idea felt a bit stale. A “pc on wheels” was kind of novel in 2020; now, a “software-defined car” is the assumed place to begin for each new automotive.
{Photograph}: Tristan deBrauwere
The car’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 value made it significantly uncompetitive-feeling as different automakers stored saying new fashions. 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 leisure promoting level is one thing customers need or want from a automotive proper now. The sedan’s promised autonomous driving capabilities have been presupposed to be imminent, and so the automotive was stuffed to maintain all nondrivers good and distracted: screens on the sprint and in entrance of passenger seats; built-in PlayStation Distant Play; visible “themes”; tons of in-car apps. True self-driving performance, although, has but to come back to non-public vehicles. Do folks actually need to sit of their stationary autos and sport? Now it’s a query for the farther-off future.
However Sony-Honda’s best problem could have been America’s stop-start method to electrical autos. Shopper uptake of battery-powered vehicles has stalled because the US federal authorities reduce assist 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 practically half of latest US automotive gross sales in 2030, decreased its projection to 27 % final 12 months—a reduce of 14 million automotive gross sales.
Honda, already a late-bloomer within the EV area, clearly doesn’t consider that it’s value spending gobs of cash proper now to meet up with the trade’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.
