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New development of Sony Honda joint car building! According to foreign media reports, Sony Honda Mobile (Sony Honda Mobility), a joint venture between Sony Group and Honda, will launch three electric vehicles by 2030, including a sedan, a compact car and an SUV, all built on the same platform. Among them, the first car will be launched in 2025, the sports utility vehicle (SUV) in 2027 and the affordable compact sedan in 2028.

Sony Group and Honda first announced a "marriage" in March 2022 to develop and sell high value-added electric vehicle products, which will be sold in 2025. In June of the same year, the two sides jointly established a joint venture company, "Sony Honda Mobility", which is located in Tokyo, Japan, with a registered capital of 10 billion yen, with 50% of the shares of each side. Taixiu Mizuno, a former Honda minister in China, is the chairman and CEO of the joint venture, and Sony Mobile President and CEO Kawanishi Izumi is the joint venture president and COO.

In January 2023, Sony Honda Mobile announced the launch of a new Smart + connected Electric vehicle brand named "AFEELA" and the debut of the AFEELA concept car. The official picture that has been released shows that the design of the AFEELA concept car is simple, but full of technology. The front face uses a closed grille with a penetrating LED light belt, and the center is marked with the word "AFEELA", which can be recognized more after glowing. On the side of the body, the lines of the new car are very smooth, and the door handle is concealed. The biggest highlight of the new car is the elimination of the traditional rearview mirror design, replaced by an external camera, and the bottom is equipped with large-size low-resistance design wheels. In terms of body size, the length, width and height of the new car are 4895/1900/1460mm, the wheelbase is 3000mm, and the B+ class sedan is located. In the rear part of the car, the new car taillights adopt the popular penetrating shape, with a slender and slender trim running through the left and right ends, and the tail is also marked with the word "AFEELA".

In the internal part, the new car also adopts minimalist design style, equipped with through multi-screen system, external camera display screen and unique steering wheel, air conditioning outlet adopts hidden layout, the overall sense of science and technology. In terms of power, it has not been officially announced, and the new car is expected to be equipped with a dual-motor four-wheel drive system.

AFEELA streetcars are scheduled to go into production in Honda's US market, with bookings in the first half of 2025, sales at the end of 2025, and delivery of the first vehicles in North America in the spring of 2026. It is understood that Sony Honda Mobile will develop a series of models that can compete with Tesla in major North American markets.

For Sony Group and Honda Motor "marriage" to build cars, industry insiders believe that the cooperation between the two sides is quite a warm intention. In the joint venture, Sony is mainly responsible for developing car software and in-car entertainment systems and providing a travel service platform, while Honda focuses more on production and sales. Although Sony is not born in the automotive field, but as a world-famous large integrated multinational group, Sony has a certain accumulation in digital products. Sony's president has said that areas such as sensors, communications and entertainment systems needed for pure electric vehicles are Sony's strengths, and this is a good opportunity for Sony to redefine cars. For Honda, although it is a well-known car brand in the world, it is more limited to the development of traditional cars and lacks advantages in intelligence. Cooperation with Sony can just learn from each other and try to make up for its own intelligence deficiency.

So can Sony and Honda make the market tremble? Auto Industry concern believes that Honda and Sony may face more challenges if they want to break through the tight siege in the electric era. after all, the first model of the cooperation will not be available to consumers until 2025 at the earliest. Obviously, "to find the right to speak again in the electric era" has become an important issue for Japanese car companies, including Honda Motor.

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