Sony Is Finally Killing the EV No One Ever Thought They’d Actually Ship

The company is shutting down its mobility partnership with Honda.

EXPERT OPINION BY JASON ATEN, TECH COLUMNIST @JASONATEN

The Afeela prototype on display at CES 2026. Image Credit: Jason Aten

A few months ago, I sat in what Sony told me was the production version of the Afeela 1. It wasn’t technically a test drive since, well, we didn’t drive anywhere. The demo at CES in January was more about all the cool tech that Sony had managed to pack into the car. The technology was impressive, as much as a car that doesn’t drive can be impressive.

Now we know that’s as impressive as it will ever be. On Wednesday, Sony Honda Mobility announced it was shutting down the whole program. Sony will not be making an EV.

As unsurprising as that is, Sony spent five years talking about how it was making a car. At CES 2020, Sony drove a car onto the stage at the end of its keynote. The Vision-S prototype looked somewhere between a Tesla Model 3 and a Porsche Cayman. The company that makes televisions, cameras, and PlayStations was making a car with 33 sensors embedded inside and out, including CMOS image sensors and LiDAR. Sony’s CEO Kenichiro Yoshida introduced it with the kind of confidence that made you think that they might be serious.

At the time, I wrote that Tesla should pay attention — not because Sony was necessarily going to sell millions of cars, but because Sony already knew how to build the sensor technology that would define the next generation of vehicles. The real opportunity, I argued, wasn’t even in selling cars directly. It was in being the technology expert that helped automakers build EVs people actually wanted. Sony was already selling its camera sensors to Apple for the iPhone, for example. The same logic could apply to the auto industry.

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Two years later, Sony came back to CES with a second concept — the Vision-S02 — and an actual announcement: Sony Mobility. The company said it was going to build and sell its own vehicle.

Still, the question I kept returning to was whether Sony’s real goal was ever to sell vehicles to consumers. Selling a car is a fundamentally different proposition than selling an OLED television or a camera sensor. At the same time, Sony had recruited serious partners and announced a joint venture with Honda. They were doing all the things you would do if you were serious.

It turns out that you can be very serious about making a car without actually getting close to making one. The Afeela brand—which is what Sony ultimately decided to call its EV platform—is done.

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