Sony shows off an electric SUV and says company may start selling cars

Enlarge / Sony has followed 2020's Vision-S 01 sedan with this, the Vision-S 02. It's an electric SUV, and the company might well put it into production. (credit: Sony)

In 2020, Sony surprised the world by unveiling an electric concept car at CES. Called the Vision-S, it was designed to showcase technology from across the breadth of the Japanese technology firm. January 2021 saw CES go entirely virtual for obvious reasons, but that didn't stop Sony from showing off the Vision-S again. This time, it was a fleet of them, including footage of on-road testing in Austria.

CES in 2022 is mostly virtual-there might be people on the ground in Las Vegas, but I'm certainly not one of them-and Sony's EV is back once again. And it has brought a friend: an SUV called the Vision-S 02. (This means the sedan is known as the Vision-S 01.)

The Vision-S 01 (right) was first shown off at CES in 2020. Since then, it's been in development in Germany, Austria, and Japan. (credit: Sony)

The Vision-S 02 uses the same EV powertrain as the sedan, which should still mean a pair of 200 kW (268 hp) electric motors, one for each axle. Yet again, Sony has made extensive use of its sensor know-how to endow the Vision-S 02 with a mix of lidar and high-resolution, wide-dynamic-range CMOS optical sensors that give the car a 360-degree view of the world around it. The Vision-S uses that fused sensor data to inform drivers about their driving environment, alerting them to the presence of emergency vehicles and so on.

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