Sony stuns CES with an electric show car, the Vision-S

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  If it wasn’t bad enough that car companies started going to CES to show off technology, now technology companies are going to CES to show off cars. This is the Sony Vision-S concept. [credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images ]

It seems like just yesterday I was complaining about CES turning into a car show. Someone must have heard me, because it appears the response from the tech sector was to say “hold my beer and watch this…” On Monday evening in Las Vegas, Sony used the last few minutes of its CES keynote to show off a concept electric vehicle called the Vision-S.

Yes, Sony, maker of Walkmen and Playstations and TVs and so on. And yes, an EV concept car, in this case a sedan that, if you squint, looks a bit like a cross between a Porsche Taycan and a Lucid Air. We don’t believe Sony has any plans to start challenging Tesla in the marketplace or to offer a driving experience beyond hooking a steering wheel up to a PS4. Instead, the Vision-S is a showcase for all the enabling technologies that Sony does have a hand in.

There are sensors—33 of them in total, including high-resolution CMOS optical, solid state lidar, radar, and time-of-flight sensors, all of which are fused together to create an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) suite that Sony is calling a “Safety Cocoon” (pdf).