At CES 2020 in Las Vegas, the Sony Group received the most attention. The Sony Group will exhibit the SUV version "VISION-S 02" of the concept EV "VISION-S 01" announced at CES two years ago, and announce that it will establish a new company "Sony Mobility Co., Ltd." in the spring of 2022. bottom.
Kenichiro Yoshida, CEO and Chairman of Sony Group, said, "We have begun full-scale consideration of commercialization." In this exhibition, the model name "01" is given to the 4-door coupe model, which was conventionally called "VISION-S CONCEPT", and you can feel the strong will for commercialization. Sony, which initially admitted that it was an option for its own brand EV business, but was never positive, is finally starting to move.
Kenichiro Yoshida, President and Chairman of Sony Group
So far, the company has spent two years conducting test runs on public roads while conducting various experimental efforts to find out what value it can provide to EVs. Many entertainment elements that are typical of Sony are included, but the basic parts of the EV, such as the system configuration that securely interconnects the vehicle control network and computer network, constant vehicle monitoring using the 5G network, and automatic updates, have also been refined. It is rare. In Germany, which continues to test drive, a demonstration experiment of remote automated driving through 5G has also started.
Body design and production have been promoted in partnership with Magna Steyr (Austria), which has designed and produced cars from major Japanese and European automakers. The VISION-S platform, which has been boiled down for two years, is conscious of expanding to various vehicle models. That said, these areas are, in other words, "familiar" areas that automakers are good at.
So why did Sony decide to make a full-scale entry into the EV market? President Yoshida seems to think that Sony has "existence value" in three areas. It is "safety," "adaptability," and "entertainment." Of these, entertainment is a specialty that everyone knows as a top company in game consoles, audio, and video equipment. In addition to stereophonic sound, visual design, and directing, the concept model has also proposed a function that collects high-definition video recorded by a drive recorder and automatically converts it into original video content.
In terms of safety as well as the performance of CMOS image sensors, it is a top company, but in addition, it has been focusing on developing sensors that will be the "eyes of the car" such as the dT of LiDAR sensor that performs spatial distance measurement with a laser, but it is not the only one. Sony, which has strengths in video processing technology, has proposed within the industry including circuits and software that process information gathered from sensors.
It is said that VISION-S has 40 sensors including radar and ultrasonic sensors, but it is not possible to ensure safety just by arranging the sensors. It can be reflected in the strengths of our own brand EV because we have the results of developing and proposing software that integrates and integrates appropriate video processing circuits.
It is an area where it is easy to vertically integrate devices such as CMOS image sensors and LiDAR sensors, from upstream technologies such as circuit design to process them appropriately, to the final commercial value. With regard to adaptability, we can make use of our experience in developing cloud services that support smartphones, game consoles, and game consoles.