Future Honda car will be more of an "entertainment space"

And one of those companies is very close to home for those of us who are among the class of vulnerable road users because we ride motorcycles: Honda. Get ready, because these new cars, more connected than ever, are expected to be on the road in the United States in less than four years.

Honda's vehicles and Sony's technology and entertainment

Earlier this year, Honda and Sony announced a joint venture called Sony Honda Mobility, Inc. Recently, executives of the company provided a little more information about plans for a new car that they said will be more than just another vehicle. (The full news conference is on YouTube if you want to see it.)

Chairman and CEO Yasuhide Mizuno said a new electric vehicle will be built at Honda's plants in North America and go on sale late in 2025 with initial deliveries in the spring of 2026 in the United States and later that year in Japan. And while no details were provided about the body style, where the batteries will be sourced, what range or other performance standards it will reach, Mizuno did emphasize the high level of computing power the vehicle will carry, along with higher levels of connectivity to the cloud. He said it will also be capable of Level 3 automated driving in some situations and Level 2 in others. In Level 3, the car handles many driving decisions but the human must be ready to take over.

Presumably, the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) will allow the "driver" to pay more attention to the other services offered by Sony. It's not certain what those will be, but clearly it's a major part of the plan.

"The mobility industry is going through an enormous change, with digital technology and software at its epicenter," said Mizuno. "In that situation, Sony is aiming to contribute to the mobility evolution with a vision of transforming the mobility as an entertainment space."

If the idea of a Honda driver bearing down on you or other vulnerable road users — motorcyclists, bicyclists, pedestrians — while caught up in the latest Sony Pictures release makes you nervous, well, it could be even worse than that. Company President and COO Izumi Kawanishi talked about making the car "an entertaining emotional space that can be expanded by integrating real and virtual worlds. We will leverage digital techonology such as the Metaverse and explore new forms of entertainment."

That's right. Why pay attention to the real world ahead of you when you can have fun exploring the Metaverse while driving?

Of course along with greater entertainment, Sony Honda Mobility is also promising us greater safety through better ADAS and improved technology. Kawanishi even talked about creating a "collision-free society."

For anything close to that to happen, the ADAS will have to be better than what we have now. Considering that the person behind the wheel of the 2026 Honda EV could be immersed in a virtual world where people only recently got legs, we all better hope those Sony sensors are really good and can accurately spot us before we get run over.