Honda, Sony may form standalone brand for EV partnership

Back in March of 2022, Honda announced that it would be partnering with Sony to create electric vehicles. The aim of the partnership is to create a joint venture and release vehicles by the year 2025.

With this partnership, Honda will be manufacturing and marketing the vehicle while Sony will create the Mobility Service platform. The idea is to combine Honda’s expertise in car building and sales with Sony’s infotainment and image sensor mastery.

Honda will be banking on this as they have a goal to convert their vehicle line up to fully electric by 2040. But in order to actually make it happen, Sony and Honda have apparently come into an agreement that the joint venture to build EVs will be better off as a standalone company.

As it stands now, Honda has one of the leanest lineups as they only have the EU-only released EV, the Honda E. Sony, on the other hand, also wants to venture into the EV market. They teased their Vision-S EV and Vision-S 02 EV SUV. It comes with 33 different sensors for 360 Reality Audio tech, wide-screen displays, autonomous driving, and other tech features. 

Sony has already started to build its Mobility platform department. This department will spearhead their foray into the joint venture and provide the EV vehicle software.

The partnership seems to have bared fruit already as it has reportedly morphed into a stand-alone project and may start releasing EVs by 2030. Investing 40 billion USD (2.11 trillion PHP) into the venture, Honda wants to launch 30 new EVs and get those vehicles on the road the same year. 

With Apple’s recent announcement on how they are working with car manufacturers on their newest incarnation of CarPlay; Sony believes that other tech companies will be joining in on the fray. With that, it’s becoming more inevitable that the word “smart” in smart cars is inching closer to reality.

Source: Nikkei Asia via Motor1