Remember Sony’s electric car from CES? Now it’s being road-tested

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  Remember the Sony Vision-S from CES in 2020? It's back for 2021, and there's more than one. [credit: Sony ]

Perhaps the highlight of last year's CES was Sony's surprise battery electric concept car, the Vision-S. At the time, we thought that the Vision-S—which looked like a cross between a Porsche Taycan and a Lucid Air—was mostly meant to show off all the different enabling technologies it contained, from sensors to entertainment. Well, the Vision-S is back for this year's not-happening-in-Las-Vegas CES, and it seems the project might be a little more serious than we once thought.

As you'll see in the embedded video, Sony has been testing the Vision-S, both on a test track and public roads in Austria. Why Austria? That's where Magna Steyr is located, a contract car manufacturer that currently builds vehicles for other car companies, including the Mercedes-Benz G-Class, BMW 5 Series, Jaguar I-Pace, and Toyota Supra. And Magna Steyr is one of Sony's partners in the Vision-S, along with automotive tier 1 suppliers Bosch, Continental, and ZF, software company Elektrobit Automotive, mapping company HERE, as well as Nvidia, Blackberry (maker of QNX) and Qualcomm.

Over the past year, the Vision-S' sensor count has grown from 33 to 40, with Sony experimenting to see how it can improve the car's 360-degree safety system. It's also been working on the interior to make it a more relaxing place to be, according to Izumi Kawanishi, senior VP for Sony's AI robotics business group.

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