Sony made a car! The Sony Vision-S Concept - Performance Technology

Performance Technology - Sony made a car! The Sony Vision-S Concept

We're behind the wheel of the Sony Vision S, something that nobody saw coming here at CES. It is a concept car from an electronics company.

Now Sony's not gonna start building cars any time soon. Mostly this is just a showcase of the safety technologies, the entertainment and connectivity software that they have available for vehicles. They just wanted to get some eyes on it with this very attractive-looking concept.

Now around the vehicle we've got a suite of 33 sensors including solid state Lidar and radar, and cameras that are going to create what Sony calls a safety cocoon and they work together in what's called a sensor fusion giving the car's computers the best visual representation of everything that's happening around the vehicle.

Now this isn't what you'd call an autonomous car. That's mostly for driver's aid technologies, but it doesn't mean that those cameras of the Lidar sensors can't work in something like a level - hands off highway autonomous system, though Sony hasn't actually mentioned anything to that respect either.

Now in the car were showcasing Sony's in-car technologies including a 360 immersive sound system that uses sensors to detect who's in the car and where they're sitting to give you the best possible sound from your audio and that audio is going to be supplied by this massive array of displays across the dashboard. We've got five displays here including cameras for the rearview mirrors. We've got a rear-view camera here and the touch sensitive area here. It's a lot of displays and they're basically showcasing their software for music and navigation and whatnot and basically showing different ways that the driver can interact with this software to, for example, send things over to the passenger.

Now what about the car that surrounds all of this. It's an electric sedan. It's sleekly designed and what we know about it is that it basically has electrical wheel drive and from what I can tell, about maybe 300 miles of range, but that's not the whole point of this. The electric car is again just the showcase now someone did go out of their way to say that this platform can be adapted to other vehicles and they are working with about a dozen partners including Magna, Continental and Basf, so maybe we'll see a Sony electric SUV concept somewhere down the road.

Be sure to check out the rest of our coverage of CES 2020 for even more debuts of electric cars and autonomous vehicles and surprises like this that you don't see coming.

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