Las Vegas. The Consumer Electronics Show. Wannabe tech startups hawking their ‘groundbreaking’ products next to the established big boys and slot machines. A journalist pleading with a Sony executive, trying to get this businessman to understand that his groundbreaking product doesn’t have a chance. The Sony exec insists “We think we know best.”
That was 1978, and the journalist, writing for Videofax magazine ten years later, explains an interaction he had with a Sony executive at one of the early iterations of CES. At this meeting, the writer tries to get the Sony exec to understand that RCA’s VHS player, while perhaps technically inferior, has a ton of features that people want. I probably don’t need to explain to you what happens next. Sony’s Betamax loses, VHS wins.
I mention this because Sony and Honda’s partnership has produced the Afeela 1, a seemingly overpriced electric car that’s extremely advanced in certain areas yet missing some key features. These are two Japanese companies with storied histories who are historical leaders in technology, so they need to be taken seriously. Is Sony right this time? Are they repeating history?
That’s sort of the theme today for The Morning Dump. How worried should Japanese companies be about the future? There was once a time when it seemed like Japanese firms would take over the world. They didn’t. And now Japanese companies are awkwardly stuck between the United States and China. This year’s CES is a good example of this, with automakers and automotive companies freaking out over an American chipmaker, NVIDIA. At the same time, Japan’s key battery maker is saying it’s going to try to get China out of its battery supply chain in North America
And what about Toyota? Why, it just launched its own micromobility city. That’ll do the trick!
The Sony Afeela 1 Vs. The World
The first update I got about the Afeela 1’s price was not from Sony or Honda or the combined Sony Honda Mobility. It was from an open-minded journalist pal at the press conference who immediately insisted, upon seeing the price and specs, that everyone involved should be sent to prison. Well, that’s the mild version of it I’m willing to share.
Automotive journalists who, it should be remembered, were largely skeptical of Tesla for years, do not get this. Or, at least, the ones I’ve talked to and seen post on social, don’t get it. The approach from Sony and Honda is to build a car that’s more a consumer electronic than an actual vehicle you drive. From the company’s press release:
SHM aims to revolutionize the mobility experience by redefining the relationship between people and mobility. The first model, AFEELA 1, pursues an interactive relationship between people and vehicles through the integration of advanced software and high-performance hardware, resulting in intelligent mobility. AFEELA 1 will continue to evolve as a new form of mobility that remains closely connected to people, through collaboration with creators and ongoing software updates.
AFEELA 1 is equipped with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) that reduces driving stress and provides a safe and secure mobility experience, as well as an interactive personal agent that enables communication with the vehicle. The cabin features a unique sound system and displays optimally placed for each seat, allowing occupants to enjoy a variety of apps and entertainment content. The vehicle’s performance is designed to provide a sense of unity with the driver, ensuring agile and stable handling while offering a high-quality ride for all passengers
The first big issue, of course, is the range and price. The new car is set to offer relatively slower charging speeds (150 kW), and lower range (around 300 miles on the EPA cycle), from a large battery (91 kWh), at a price ($89k to $100k if you want a non-black one) that seems to make no sense. Just from the pure stats, as Thomas pointed out, there’s not a lot here that can be justified. Just for comparison, a $42k Hyundai Ioniq 6 can go 316 miles (or 342 with the single motor), use a 350 kWh charger, and does all this with a smaller (77.4 kWh) battery.
When first discussed, the SHM Afeela 1 was supposed to have up to Level 3 autonomy, wherein the car is driving itself for long periods of time. Instead, it’s being touted as having “Level 2+” autonomy, which is whatever Sony wants it to be, I suppose, since it appears to be a term someone made up. Granted, the Afeela 1 does have an incredible number of sensors. There are 40 in total, including cameras, radar, ultrasonic, and even LIDAR. Again, you’re buying an entertainment system you can drive, that’s part Walkman and part PS5.
It’s entirely possible that the autojournalists are all wrong and Sony and Honda are correct. So let’s go back to the whole premise of this piece. Did Sony and Honda just create a Betamax?
I’ll refer you again to the Betamax (or Beta Tape) article from Videofax, which is the best version of this history lesson I’ve read. The journalists point to all sorts of familiar flaws, especially Sony’s insistence that it didn’t need a longer playing time because that would impair quality. Even worse, Sony insisted on not sharing its license so that other companies could build Betamax players, or cameras, or tapes. It was Sony or nothing.
At the dawn of the consumer video age, dating back to the earliest meetings between representatives of the Beta and VHS camps, Sony made a major tactical error in assuming that their marketing expertise alone was strong enough to make Beta the dominant format. We feel that this was the single biggest blunder that directly led to the Beta’s downfall. By refusing to acquiesce to RCA’s demands for longer-playing time, Sony lost the support of the number-one TV manufacturer in the U.S. By refusing to license Hitachi to make Beta, for fear of alienating Matsushita, Sony ultimately wound up losing support from both firms. Without the support of Matsushita and RCA, Sony could never recover from the lost momentum. Keep in mind that all of these events occurred before a single Beta or VHS deck was ever sold to consumers. Once these seeds were sewn, the end of the battle was essentially over before it began.
So is this thing Betamax? It has a shorter range, presumably because most people rarely use the range they’re promised. It’s technically interesting but less sexy than most of its competitors.
Nah, it’s not Betamax. This is where historical analogs sometimes fall apart. In a weird way, Tesla is probably more Betamax than SHM, it’s just that Tesla was stubborn and smart enough to make it work. Tesla insisted on doing things its own way, including utilizing a proprietary charging standard and forcing others to adapt to it. It built its own charging network and refused to use dealers. Tesla was the more expensive option, with the Nissan Leaf (which used the shared charging plug at the time) being the cheaper (but in many ways inferior) alternative.
So is SHM building VHS? Nope. If anyone is building VHS today it’s Chinese automakers. They’re able to build a wide variety of cars, packed with both low- and high-tech features, at every price point and for every potential buyer. Most Chinese automakers outside of BYD don’t make their own batteries, instead relying on CATL or other firms. They also use a shared charging standard.
Perhaps this is LaserDisk? Something that’ll be prized by a few and definitely offers some advantages, but also doesn’t have a large enough place in the market to be sustainable. SHM is touting what it calls 3A, which stands for “Autonomy, Augmentation, Affinity” and this product is only to be sold in California at first. It’s a niche product for niche customers right now, so in that sense it’s perhaps hard to judge.
Still, I don’t see it. If you want true Level 3 autonomy with LIDAR you can get a Mercedes-Benz with DrivePilot. If you trust Elon Musk and cameras, you can get way more car with literally any Tesla.
Automakers Are Acting Like ‘Swifties’ Around NVIDIA CEO
Who is the most important automotive supplier in the world? Is it Michelin? They provide the only part of the car that’s supposed to regularly touch the road. Maybe Bosch, which makes all sorts of key hardware. It could be CATL, the biggest battery maker for cars there is.
Based on the reaction he got at CES, there’s an argument to be made that it’s NVIDIA. Carmakers don’t want to be left behind in the shift to autonomous cars, which is somehow both inevitable and also somehow never quite here, and you need compute in order to make that work. There’s no company in the world that has the compute that NVIDIA provides, which is why Elon Musk has been so keen on securing as much of the company’s chips as he possibly can get his hands on.
NVIDIA DRIVE, which is the overarching name for NVIDIA’s mix of chips and architecture, is on display at CES in a huge number of cars, including Volvo’s EX90, the Zeekr Mix and Zeekr 001, the Rivian R1s, the Lucid Air, and many more. The response to NVIDIA Chairman and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote was described thusly by Automotive News in a story titled “At CES 2025, it’s Nvidia’s world and we’re all just living in it.”
Nvidia’s leather-jacket-wearing CEO Jensen Huang has helped attract the tech-obsessed to the automotive world and vice versa. CES attendees queuing up at 4:30 p.m. for Huang’s 6:30 p.m. address evoked Taylor Swift’s Swifties, except the fervent chatter revolved around compute instead of Travis Kelce being cute.
The promise of AI, powered by Nvidia’s hardware and software, has erased the dividing line between the physical world of cars and trucks and the virtual one of big tech. At CES, it is glaringly obvious: Times have changed.
The worlds of cars and computers have become one; it’s now Nvidia’s and Huang’s world, and we’re all just living in it.
I’ve probably mentioned before that I’m a big fan of ’70s and ’80s Sci-Fi, especially from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. The work these authors put forth assumes a political, technological, cultural, manufacturing, and financial hegemony from Japan that never quite emerged post-Bubble. If anything, the cultural imports from Japan have mostly usurped the technological ones lately. NVIDIA is an American company, after all.
Panasonic Says It’s ‘No. 1 Objective’ Is To Remove Its Dependence On China
Both Honda and Toyota have become dominant players in the car market in the United States and, especially with hybrid technology, continue to pick up market share. I don’t want to act as if Japanese companies are all lost and hopeless. While both of those companies are behind their peers when it comes to building electric cars, there’s one Japanese company that’s been quite successful in the EV age.
Panasonic became the main battery supplier to Tesla almost from the beginning, and it’s helped put Panasonic Energy of North America as one of the five largest battery makers in the world. Does it really on China? Yes. The Chinese government made securing the materials necessary to make modern car batteries a priority and still control most of the supply.
At CES, the CEO of Panasonic Energy NA told a Reuters reporter that taking China out of the supply chain for batteries used over here is its “No. 1 objective” due to President Trump’s projected tariffs:
The first thing the business has to do in regards to Trump tariffs is “not to have the supply chain dedicated from China,” Swan told Reuters in an interview in Las Vegas on Monday at the CES trade show.
That’s good for Panasonic, but it’s just the latest example of car-related Japanese industries having to adjust to American politics. President Biden has blocked a deal that would see U.S. Steel sold to Japan’s Nippon Steel, causing all sorts of concerns in Japan.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi also called Biden’s decision “unfortunate” in a regular news conference on Tuesday. “A strong economic relationship is also the foundation of [Japan-U.S.] bilateral relationship,” he said.
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba also said on Monday that Washington’s decision has raised eyebrows in the nation’s industrial sector and that his administration will “urge the U.S. government to take action to eliminate these concerns.”
The incident has “a very large impact” on Japanese businesses, according to Ken Kobayashi, chairperson of The Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former chairman of Mitsubishi Corporation.
This isn’t an issue that looks to immediately improve in a Trump Administration given campaign promises around imports.
Toyota Is Building A City Of The Future
Toyota had an interesting announcement at CES this year, touting its “Woven City” of the future it is building on the grounds of a former plant in Shizuoka Prefecture in Japan.
You can read the press release, which sounds a little like science fiction:
Residents and visitors will play an equally vital role alongside inventors in Woven City. Known as ‘Weavers,’ these individuals share a passion for the ‘expansion of mobility’ and a commitment to building a more flourishing society. Through their participation in co-creation activities, Weavers will contribute to realizing the full potential of Woven City.
At the official launch of Woven City, starting in fall 2025 or thereafter, approximately 100 residents―primarily Toyota and WbyT staff and their families―are expected to participate in co-creation activities as the first residents. The community will then gradually expand to include external inventors and their families. Phase 1 is projected to accommodate around 360 residents, with the total population, including Phase 2 and subsequent phases, expected to reach approximately 2,000. Initially, visitors will be limited to related parties, with plans to welcome the general public to participate as Weavers in co-creation activities starting in FY2026 or thereafter.
Woven City also serves as a test course for Toyota’s transformation into a mobility company. Together, Toyota and WbyT aim to redefine mobility, expanding its scope beyond transportation to encompass the movement of people, goods, information, and energy for the benefit of individuals and society.
The ‘weavers’ sound like a use-caste in N.K. Jemisin’s “The Fifth Season.”
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
Doesn’t “Crosseyed And Painless” by the Talking Heads just feel right today? It feels right to me.
The Big Question
What is the historical equivalent of the Afeela 1? Related question: What’s your all-time favorite Sony product?
Top graphic images: Sony, Honda
VHS’ biggest single advantage over Beta was runtime. The two-hour SP setting meant a typical Hollywood theatrical movie would fit on one tape, and the four-hour LP mode right from the start meant that you could tape a game or the movie scheduled after it with a buffer if the game ran long. By the early ’80s SLP/EP mode got 6 hours runtime from one tape. Picture quality? Don’t ask.
Likewise, SHM seems to have sacrificed metrics customers care about (price/value, range, versatility, H-point) for others they don’t but this time as a latecomer working at a time when it’s known going in that these are the things they care about.
It’s the gearbox electric mountain bike?
I’m a big fan of Sony’s stuff, but my favorite has to be the PlayStation. It was the ultimate FU to Nintendo after their failed collaboration with Sony for a SNES CD ROM led to the PlayStation.
Sadly Nintendo hasn’t learned all of their lessons. They’ve always been a thorn in my side anytime I’m involved in a game that releases on their platforms lol.
Yep, every planned city ever has worked out and is a good idea.
I’m also sad to see MoBiLiTy thrown around again with such fervor. I thought that had finally died down.
We moved from Venezuela to the US in 1982 (just in time) and brought our Betamax with us. Betamax was dominant there at least through the rest of the 80s, many years after it died in the US. I’m not sure how, but I see this as some kind of metaphor for the country in the 80s.
I loved my Sony Walkman and listening to Talking Heads on it. That was an awesome time listening to great music on a super cool device. I was even rocking slip-on checkerboard Vans. I wish I were that cool today.
They’re currently negotiating with James Brown’s estate to use AI to create the marketing pitch…
Ah feela good, I know that I would….
These should be fun to pick up for $7,000 in 2029.
Afeela like Sony and Honda inked a deal to launch a car back when SAE Level 5 autonomy had only been 3 years away for 2 years and neither one was willing to be the one to break it off.
Something good did come out of the Betamax R&D… Betacam was a professional video system that was based around the Betamax cassette shell. Similarly, Matsushita/Panasonic came up with a competing format called MII (M-2) based on the VHS cassette shell. (Lore in the business was that NBC was tired of Sony’s virtual monopoly and heavily encouraged its development.) I shot with both during my news photographer days. (In a pinch, if you ran out of tapes on a shoot, you could go to a local drug store, buy Betamax tapes there and use them in the Betacam. It wasn’t optimal and I only did that once. One could not do that with MII, because the field acquisition tapes were smaller than the consumer tapes.) MII was pretty late to the game, had some newer electronic and videotape formulation and between that and surprisingly better cameras, made a noticeably better picture. But their tape editing equipment was just awful to begin with. And the camcorders were poorly sealed against dust and wore out video heads at an alarming rate. Sony had all that down pat. Betacam eventually evolved to Betacam SP and reached picture quality parity with MII.
Back then Sony had at least 95% of that market. The station I was working at in 1988 went with MII and I covered the Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Moscow. Out of scores of TV photographers from around the world, I never saw anyone else shooting on MII. That caused a lot of pain because I had to take a portable deck to record pool feeds, schlep it back across Red Square to the hotel to edit our stuff and then to the uplink site to feed it back to the States.
Now they shoot on memory cards and don’t have to digitize the tape in order to edit it with Avid, Final Cut or Premiere.
Even with the faults of MII I think that’s enough reward.
Almost humble brag there. I would humble brag my ass off if it were me.
Aston Martin Lagonda?
Bristol Brabazon?
NeXT computers?
If you ask my eight-year-old son, the Sony PS5 is the best thing to ever exist.
I have fond memories of the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, myself. Grand Theft Auto cheat codes, anyone?
I wish my job was to figure out how to do the “displays optimally placed for each seat”
thing at Sony Honda Mobility (lol) and see how long I could milk that job for! Sounds like a sweet gig!
KITT, is that you?
I want it voiced by Mr. Feeny as well just like the original KITT.
When I was a kid, Sony was the absolute KING of electronics. The stuff they produced was just incredible. To this day I own several Sony marvels, including a “Watchman” with a fascinating vertical tube arrangement, a Sony all in one hifi with phono, which still performs beautifully, and a collection of handicams ranging back to the super-8 days. When did they lose their way?
Betamax was an early sign, but not a fatal blow. They ceased being a consumer tech company when they refused to produce DRM-free portable digital audio players. They were there before the iPod, and definitely still had the brand power to make it the dominant choice.
Instead they insisted on proprietary encrypted DRM devices that were useless (at least out of the box) for the way people wanted to experience their music.
That’s when they became a content IP company first. If not for the success of the Play Station (which they have almost ruined more than once through their internal culture of non-collaborative teams competing for wins instead of applying all of their talents towards a common goal), they may have been out of consumer electronics a while ago. At least in the US. I don’t know how they do in other markets.
Collapse of the Japanese economy and price of the Yen vs US dollar probably didn’t help things either. Some of their ungodly complicated stuff, while expensive, must have gotten even more expensive once all of that happened.
When I got to college in 1990, I couldn’t afford a Walkman, so I had some clunky knockoff. Real Walkmans were smaller & better built, but other than the bright yellow Sport model (which wasn’t smaller), they were kind of similar: gray plastic with some chromed plastic and maybe some real metal bits.
Then I saw my friend’s Walkman. She was Taiwanese (via NYC) and had a JDM (so to speak) Walkman. It was much smaller than any US model, with a case that was enameled metal in a color that I can only describe as British Racing Green. Holding it felt like holding a small ingot. In a way, that thing changed my world, probably the first time I properly understood that the USA, perhaps, was not #1.
I’ve never thought of it this way, but in retrospect, that thing foreshadowed Lexus.
I met my friend from Scotland in London once, and she got a text. I saw her phone and asked her what the heck it was. It was a damn spaceship. The US is held back by regulations…in a bad way.
Sony hasn’t made anything good for a long while because they fired a pretty good chunk of their international engineers and only held onto their Japanese and American staff due to pressure from the Japanese government (see also Mitsubishi, NEC, Mitsui, Matsushita, JVC, and Nippon Steel). Meanwhile they force partners for whatever they make to work under their standards, which is why nobody pairs up with them for anything anymore. They had to have long negotiations with AMD over the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation Portal’s hardware because they have that much of a reputation for being dicks with the PlayStation 4 and Bravia+ smart TVs. It feels like Honda got trapped into an abusive relationship with this one.
As for Jensen Huang… Yeah, no. Dude’s just completely fucking lost his mind. And he’s betting everything on the current machine learning bubble because nVidia created a moat around CUDA that is the one thing other companies can’t currently cross. The problem is C-suites are morons who bow to peer pressure (oh don’t worry, they don’t see us as peers, only other C-suite executives) and so they bandwagoned worse than Instagram models, not knowing that everybody else is taking tunnel borers to that defensive CUDA structure and that it’s only got another two years or so before it collapses. And the market is too inflexible to react quickly enough to it, meaning there’s going to be a catastrophic fallout while the hardware technology sector’s still recovering from the 2022 layoffs. nVidia exploded when this LLM shit suddenly stopped being a joke and became a way to hoard even more wealth by cutting out even more of the workforce and property rights, and so everyone’s flocking to them even though nVidia really has no clue in a white hot hell what they’re actually doing. They stumbled into this all by accident and have been bruteforcing it by selling oversized GPUs for insane prices.
Reading the description of the interior experience makes me dizzy, and I can only imagine the highly conceptual discussions in internal programming and design meetings. What a waste. It’s just a product coming from unimaginative people trying to blindly interpret other people’s vision, in this case I venture Philip K Dick and Speilberg, attempting to build that red Lexus.
Not to play in the political sphere, but I’m genuinely surprised that anyone thought the Nippon-U.S. Steel deal would go through. I knew it would never be allowed, and it seemed like nearly every pundit had the same thoughts, yet the markets responded with surprise to the news. As always, the market response to things continues to amuse and confuse me.
My favorite Sony product is probably my XM3 noise cancelling headphones. They are a godsend on long, international flights.
Don’t know the future, but the past is getting clearer every day.
Favorite is the Sony Trinitron. Anyone who’s ever worked in the TV game could not have made it without one.
Obligatory Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyKRubB5N60
TLDR: Where Beta was better, it was marginally better. Where Beta was worse, it was massively worse.
Matt,
Didn’t you write a whole article once, basically just shitting on Jessi Lang? Just checking.
The word mobility makes me throw up in my mouth every fucking time. What a stupid term to apply to transportation.
How so?
It’s a mealy-mouthed circumlocution, a misdirection that wants to be a euphemism for the future without bothering to mean anything. Does it mean driving? Getting a ride? Getting a scooter or genuine mobility device for a disabled person?
What it usually means is someone is scheming to bilk you the cost of a subscription to something in addition to the car payment, which has nothing to do with mobility or transportation. The McLaren F1 was never about “mobility,” the NSX was never about “mobility,” and yet the future we’re supposed to excited about is being abstracted away, packaged in bland vagaries, and sold back on a monthly basis as “mobility.”
I don’t think you really understand what this word means and how it is used in the context of the movement of humans in general. Part of my job involves vehicle safety and Vision Zero, and I am personally and professionally loosely tied to urban-planning people. In urban planning, ‘mobility’ is an everyday word that is none of the things that you decry. It refers to how people move through their built environment in all contexts. It is in a sense one level of abstraction above specific types of transportation.
I really do understand what the word means. I even mentioned some of the other perfectly valid use cases for the word mobility, in which I literally point out how it refers to the ways people move through their built in environment in all (or at least additional, I was neither attempting nor presuming to me exhaustive). I’m trying not to be too snippy but you can’t tell me I don’t know what a word means and then counter by making a point that is clearly, visibly what I just wrote.
I was deconstructing how, when contextualized to cars, “mobility” becomes this soft, vague, squishy thing that often ends up with the consumer:
– paying for software that doesn’t exist and likely never will
– paying for capabilities that don’t exist and likely never will
– paying a subscription for the privilege.
Mobility is not a bad thing. We should have more mobility! Public transport, walkability, accessibility (I’m a firm believer that making things accessible for the disabled is a net good for everyone), bike lanes, you name it. But when a car or brand of car is launched around a theme of “mobility,” it’s a sign the only thing they’ve figured out is how they plan to separate you from your money – not how it drives, not how it holds up against real world competition, not how it benchmarks to peers and predecessors. The car is tertiary, if even that.
It’s akin to “lifestyle.” You can have a busy lifestyle, an active one, a sedentary one, etc. But once you’re trying to sell something on a (mushy, ill-defined) “lifestyle,” it means what? $200 sweatpants? Organic chia seeds? MAGA hats? There is no such thing as “lifestyle” (as an adjective, if the scare quotes don’t set it off enough) just like there’s no such thing as “mobility.”
(… Yes, there is literally such a thing as mobility, the quality or ability of being capable of movement, etc etc)