Tesla is probably the electric vehicle brand that popularised the idea of adding games to cars. Initially, in 2018 the company announced that it is adding classic Atari games to its cars. Then earlier in July this year, company CEO Elon Musk said that Steam integration is on the way. Then BMW came along and announced that it will be adding the AirConsole cloud gaming service to its own cars. At some point in the future, we will probably see Sony and Honda announce something similar.
As the Financial Times reports, the two Japanese companies have established a joint venture known as Sony Honda Mobility earlier in September. They’ve yet to decide on a brand name, but the two have already decided that they want to take on the other names in the EV market in making an EV “built around a premium entertainment experience”.
With Sony in the mix, the premium entertainment part of the equation is probably sound. Izumi Kawanishi, president of the joint venture and head of Sony’s AI robotics business, claims that the company “has content, services and entertainment technologies that move people” which are being adapted to mobility. He also says that integrating the PS5 platform into cars was “technologically possible”. Not to mention previous endeavours in this space, including the VISION-S concept.
Yasuhide Mizuno, chair of the joint venture and previously chief of Honda’s Automotive Operations, also says that the joint venture will “develop a car as hardware that will cater to the entertainment”. Which is a pretty wild departure of just simply shoehorning gaming into existing EVs like the two aforementioned brands.
(Source: Financial Times)
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