Present at CES both with its own stand and at its partner Sony, Honda shows its fangs!
CES 2023 allowed Sony to confirm its ambitions in automobiles and entertainment by showing the first Afeela concept, the result of its joint venture with Honda. In 2024, if the Japanese manufacturer confirms its commitment to Sony Honda Mobility, it has also unveiled the first concepts of its future “Series 0 Honda” line: the large Honda Saloon sedan and the spacious Honda Space-Hub van.
First launches in 2026
Today left behind in the electric automobile market (Honda currently only has one battery-powered vehicle in its catalog in France, the SUV e:Ny1), Honda however aims to only sell electric vehicles. electric cars by 2040. Needless to say, time is running out. At CES, the brand unveiled two concepts that will provide inspiration for future Honda Serie 0 cars, which should see its first incarnations from 2026: the Saloon sedan and the Space Hub van.
Sporting a sleek new H logo which should symbolize a new starting point for the brand, the two vehicles are, according to Honda Motor President Toshihiro Mibe, designed according to three principles, Thin, light and wisewhich can be translated as elegance, lightness and intelligenceand five values: artistic design, autonomous driving and advanced driving aids, space for people, driving pleasure (joy of driving) and leading electrical performance.
How are these concepts supposed to translate into upcoming cars?
Elegance here is to be sought in reducing the height of the car – the weak point of many electric vehicles, according to Honda – in order to optimize its aerodynamics. Lightness must allow sporty driving, which is one of the characteristics of Honda’s automobile DNA, and has always been so.
As for intelligence, it would be a question of implementing “ the knowledge that Honda has accumulated to date and making cars smarter through the advancement of technologies “. It’s still a little vague, but we get the idea.
As for driving assistance technologies, Honda rightly recalls that it was, in 2021, the first manufacturer to put on the road a vehicle equipped with level 3 of autonomous driving, in occurrence the latest generation of Honda Legend, not marketed in Europe.
The brand’s ambition here is, from the second half of the decade, to integrate even more automated driving functions into Series 0 vehicles. This driving assistance device is developed following the principle of “human-centered” security developed by the manufacturer. According to the latter, it will integrate cutting-edge technologies in artificial intelligence, detection, recognition/decision-making, as well as driver monitoring. The goal is to anticipate risks more intuitively, naturally and accurately, to provide automated driving features that users can adopt with complete safety and, above all, true peace of mind.
But although intended to be at the cutting edge in terms of automated driving, the Serie 0 cars will always be designed with the idea that there will be a human behind the wheel, and that we must provide the latter with real pleasure of driving. to drive. Looking at the concepts, we imagine that this concerns more the lineage that will be born from the Honda Saloon than from the Space Hub, the latter being on the other hand more focused on the value of space for the people mentioned above.
Batteries, more than ever the sinews of the electric war
In terms of electrical technologies, Honda also insists on the fact that it is necessary to both reduce charging times and improve battery life. The goal to be achieved, according to Toshihiro Mibe, is to be able to charge in 15 minutes and to ensure battery degradation of no more than 10% in 10 years. In this sense, Honda is partnering with LG to design and manufacture new batteries in a joint entity.
As for recharging, the Japanese manufacturer announces a partnership with Ford and BMW to develop charging stations, but this would only concern the American territory.
In any case, it is very difficult to imagine what future Honda Zero Series products will actually look like, the concepts presented at CES containing far too many incongruities for them to be likely to resemble products which are not only approved worldwide and affordable for the end customer.
The collaboration with Sony is moving forward
As for the Afeela concept presented jointly with Sony in SHM (Sony Honda Mobility), things are also progressing. If the Afeela prototype does not evolve stylistically compared to the one that was presented last year, a new partnership was announced with Microsoft to integrate an artificial intelligence brick based on Azure OpenAI Service into the project, which would thus become somehow a personal agent for mobilityaccording to the terms used during the presentation.
Furthermore, like the Serie Zero concepts, Afeela will be at the forefront in terms of autonomous driving and driving aids. To do this, it will make strong use of artificial intelligence, powered by a multitude of sensors of all kinds, for which the boss of Honda praised the quality of those from Sony. SHM will thus adopt Vision Transformer for perception and machine learning for trajectory planning. A redundant system will also be developed to ensure security. In this system, it is Qualcomm which provides the SoCs dedicated to automotive applications.
Also read: Honda unveils Prologue, its electric SUV which will arrive in 2024
Technologies from the game
SHM also announced a collaboration with Epic Games. Although SHM has not yet revealed the progress of this partnership, it has nevertheless unveiled a simulator using virtual spaces to create a new user experience in the field of mobility.
This tool simulates external environmental conditions such as information about other vehicles, pedestrians, terrain and weather conditions. By combining this technology with augmented reality, users will benefit from an immersive experience that will enhance security. SHM will provide a 3D map on which numerous metadata from the Internet will be superimposed. Map data can also be used to expand possibilities for game and entertainment development.
To achieve these functions by incorporating sensing and vehicle data, SHM uses the Unreal Engine 5 game engine.
