Sony says you can’t buy the Vision-S, no plans to build it



Last week’s news of the Sony Vision-S being road-tested in Europe and even a short video on the design and engineering of the vehicle got many enthusiasts excited. Unfortunately, you can’t buy the Vision-S even in near future.

Sony has spilt the beans regarding the availability of the Vision-S. The company, in response to automotive portal “Car and Driver“, said it has no plans to mass-produce or sell the fully electric vehicle. Instead, experience gained in testing the imaging and sensing technology can be used to develop better systems for autonomous driving technology.

Sony said they already possessed the expertise in three of the four areas that CASE represented – Connected, Autonomous and Electric. The company felt they could play an active role in mobility and took up the challenge.

The Vision-S places full self-driving capability as its key strength. The “Safety Cocoon” concept uses 40 different imaging and scanning devices to monitor the exterior and interior of the vehicle in real-time. The target is to achieve Level 4-equivalent self-driving system. A lip-reading sensor is also placed in front of the driver to improve the accuracy of speech recognition.

While one can’t buy the Vision-S, it is still a large part of being a testbed for their consumer electronics products. The infotainment system in the Vision-S is highlighted by the “360 Reality Audio”. All four seats have individual speakers, enveloping the occupants in sound from all directions.

Various control interfaces such as haptic, gesture and touch together with the Human-Machine Interface (HMI) are also being developed and tested.

High-speed data access will be handled by a system capable of connecting to 5G networks. Sony says that apart from providing entertainment, high-speed data is also vital to enable sophisticated autonomous driving technology.

Although Sony is not building or selling the Vision-S, development partners in the project such as Magna-Steyr, Almotive, ZF and Bosch will still benefit as the project is a combination of all suppliers integrating their products and services.

So while you can’t buy the Vision-S, a technology from this working prototype could just be in the future vehicles and even the PlayStation.