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Awash in excitement for a self-driving future, autonomous vehicle design often turns the passenger experience into sterile rooms-on-wheels with seats facing one another. But what if manufacturers started with a blank slate? How would the user experience mesh with other pieces of technology in our day-to-day lives? That’s not just reimagining the automobile, it’s rethinking mobility.
AFEELA, a new brand under a joint venture between Sony and Honda—called Sony Honda Mobility—aims to do just that.
Under Sony Honda Mobility (SHM), AFEELA’s guiding principle is to tap into the key competencies of Sony and Honda, designing an experience that blends immersive entertainment, an open platform for creative expression, and next-generation autonomy all packaged up in a premium EV tuned for the next era of mobility. Announced at CES 2025 and set to be delivered in 2026, the brand’s first model, AFEELA 1, is a full-size lift-back sedan replete with pillar-to-pillar panoramic screens, Sony’s 360° Spatial Sound technologies, and myriad cabin customization options. It’s an EV designed for a near future where, sure, you could spend your commute ruminating on your never-ending list of action items, but you could also be using all those speakers to create a more positive vibe amidst 8 am bridge traffic.
Thanks to advanced sensing and computing performance, the AFEELA 1’s 40 hardware sensors and Qualcomm Technologies' 800 trillions of operations per second (or TOPS) Snapdragon® Ride™ Platform SoC (System on a Chip)—AFEELA is able to keep the vehicle constantly aware of the world around it. And this intelligence begins as soon as the driver approaches the car. As long as they have the digital key, the AFEELA 1 can detect its driver approaching the car and open the door for them. From there, drivers can use AFEELA Intelligent Drive to select their destination and head off.
Those plenitudinous sensors are doing more than opening doors—AFEELA is using all of that silicon to power advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) that can support drivers from their home to their destination. If you need to redirect your endpoint or pick some crispy tunes for the ride, AFEELA’s personalized voice agent can make those adjustments on the fly. Once you reach your destination, AFEELA can find the ideal parking spot using fused data from the vehicle’s LiDAR (light detection and ranging) and camera data.
When in motion, the driver’s dash layout can use AFEELA’s radar and camera sensors to display an immersive sensing view of the surrounding environments via graphics and renderings powered by the latest version of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine and real-time vehicle data. In addition to offering better operational awareness under normal conditions, this system can provide a clear view of the road ahead to navigate through adverse lighting conditions or complicated maneuvers, extending a driver’s capabilities.
Humanity is defined by the art, music, and media that they make and consume, and SHM developed the AFEELA brand and its first production model with self-expression as a foundational core. Between leaving their driveway and exiting the car, the average American commuter spends about 60 minutes driving roundtrip. That is time that, with advanced autonomous vehicles, can be taken back for catching up on emails, but AFEELA envisions so much more than that. Passengers front and rear can play films from the RIDEVU app from Sony and other media partners. Drivers are mechanically shielded from watching content while in motion, but while underway, they will be able to converse with the Personal Agent to get incredibly specific with their music selection. To truly live the “I heard you liked X so I built Y into the car” meme, owners can even drive a digital rendering of the AFEELA 1 within Gran Turismo 7—in the very AFEELA 1 they’re sitting in.
Other than the multitudinous screens, the vehicle’s overall interior and exterior design is intentionally subtle—drivers are draped in active noise-canceling tech to create a tranquil environment in which to spend time (or blast tracks in immersive surround sound). This tranquility creates a tabula rasa upon which owners can project their digital personality in ways a color-shifting vinyl wrap never could. After all, like the dad wearing his favorite band T-shirt to preschool drop-off, we all crave connection, and part of that connection is broadcasting our aesthetic preferences as signposts for other enthusiasts.
For instance, the AFEELA 1’s Media Bar—a digital screen in the front fascia—can be customized to dynamically display messages from informative (like vehicle charge status, warning lights, and the weather) to whimsical (animated lights, the AFEELA logo, and graphics from triple-A gaming titles). Inside the car, the cabin can be augmented with distinct UI themes and lighting profiles, e-Motor Sound effects, and more that reflect your mood. To keep this space fresh, AFEELA has announced that it will develop the Co-Creation Program, an open platform where creators and developers around the world can release content, applications, and services that run on AFEELA and help express a driver’s creativity.
This commitment to evolution is another AFEELA brand pillar. The AFEELA 1 is outfitted with all of the state-of-the-art sensors that you could possibly want in a car at a time when some production vehicles are being stripped back to the bare minimum viable product. For instance, while many vehicles use radar as standard ADAS equipment to track other vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists, AFEELA implements both radar and LiDAR, which uses laser pulses to sense the depth, distance, and speed of an object. Though LiDAR has only recently been suitably packaged for consumer vehicles, using both standards in parallel (alongside multiple camera angles) allows a future-state AFEELA to reach the highest levels of autonomous driving.
With the hardware properly future-proofed, SHM’s engineers can keep developing AFEELA’s self-driving capabilities and continuously improve the vehicle’s autonomous capabilities through constantly evolving over-the-air updates. As the AFEELA 1 currently sits, it is equipped with the ADAS capabilities one would expect from a next-gen battery-electric vehicle with the addition of connected car features accessible through AFEELA’s driver app.
The idea that your car is an extension of your identity is not a new one—America’s car culture is based on that core belief. With the appropriate budget and know-how, any vehicle can be customized in any number of interesting ways, but those augmentations are very often permanent (and more often than not, ill-advised). Why bother? Like that band T-shirt dad, humans crave individuality. To make our possessions truly ours. There’s no greater feeling than walking up to your car in a parking lot and being excited to slip behind the wheel (or in this case, steering yoke). But the ability to be able to tailor every aspect of a vehicular experience to one’s own aesthetic at a whim through a mobile app is a novel advancement. Pairing that with next-generation safety and autonomy tech? That’s a mobility revolution.
Reservations for the AFEELA 1 are currently open with a $200 one-time, refundable reservation fee, and customer cars will start hitting the streets in 2026. Learn more about the future of AFEELA here.
