We’ll All Be Entertained but Don’t Count on Much Driving in Future Afeelas

• We got a demo of what might be in the 2026 Afeela sedan and felt entertained enough but wonder about the future of what used to be called driving.

• Afeela will entertain you to pieces, which some may like.

• Everything from PlayStation 5 to Stingray Karaoke is ready to go.

You remember Afeela, don’t you? It’s been causing almost as much excitement as the Apple Car lately. But unlike the apparently canceled Apple Car, the Afeela car is still going strong, with a 2026 date for deliveries being promised.

So, to help get the word out about all things Afeela, the Honda/Sony 50/50 joint venture has started doing popup educational events at a few locations in California and may do more in the future, and I went to one.

My Afeela demo was in a now-closed small storefront in the Century City Mall in West LA, a mall usually given over to desperate teens seeking Kardashian makeup advice or cutting-edge fashionistas trying on the latest artisanal tam o’ shanters. There was a Tesla store next door.

Inside a stark, white-lined storefront box not much bigger than the single, drab, grey sedan it housed, was an Afeela four-door and a small phalanx of eager product presenters.

You may have seen this car at CES. This iteration had a few changes to its otherwise monumentally bland body. It now has side view mirrors instead of the cameras that were on last year’s car and it has larger headlights.

We got some specs: There will be 180-kW electric motors front and rear, powered by a 91-kWh battery with a relatively quick 150-kW charging capability. Range will have to come out closer to Afeela’s 2026 launch.

Surrounding this updated Afeela were the presenters, all beautiful people who, I imagined, were just possibly waiting to hear back from their agents so they could flee this Afeela gig and rocket to stardom.

“Welcome, Mark,” said my presenter, Raisu, who didn’t pause to let anything soak in, didn’t leave any downshifts where a question could be shoehorned in, he barely stopped to breathe.

“We at Sony Honda mobility aim to evolve mobility into an interactive entity to create experiences that move people to redefine the relationship between humans and mobility.”

We’re redefining relationships here. Apparently, no one cares anymore about MacPherson struts or horsepower.

We stood outside the car at the front end, where a lighted bumper screen that looked like it would quadruple the repair cost of any minor fender bender, read, “Hi Mark!” Like any of the numerous aging movie stars in the mall that morning, I felt reassured that anyone, even this car, still recognized me.

The media bar out front could also give you a themed greeting. Raisu demonstrated some. Surprisingly, all the themes were based on Sony movie characters. What are the chances of that? I got Spider Man.

Then, I got a word in edgewise: Could you program that front media bar to read backwards to give a message to somebody in front of you that they’d read in their rearview mirror?

“As of right now, you can,” he said. “But keep in mind that when it comes out, things may be a little different. Obviously, you know, for profanity and things like that.”

Which would be the whole point of putting a reverse message on your media bar!

“But for now, let’s get in, shall we?”

Getting in isn’t just a matter of pulling on a door handle, because there aren’t any door handles. The Afeela has facial recognition. Raisu put his face about a foot away from the B-pillar and, voila, the door opened all by itself.

Once inside, the door closed itself electrically. Then the seat and steering wheel moved automatically to the settings the owner/driver had programmed, in this case, Raisu. Another message welcomed me to the inside of the Afeela.

“Hi Mark,” it said. I was feeling loved, even if only electronically. I take what I can get.

In front of me was a yoke steering wheel, the better to let me see the screen in front of me, Raisu said. To my right, further infotainment screenage ran all the way to the passenger-side B-pillar. It was CinemaScope on wheels.

In future Afeelas there’ll be more than just images on the screens. There’ll be sounds and lighting as well, “to give you an enhanced departure feeling,” Raisu told me. I don’t know, man, I can barely stand the little one-second-long symphony that greets you in a Genesis or an Infiniti.

Hearing sounds and seeing lighting might just push me over the edge. Just because you can offer something doesn’t mean you should. But I’m from an ancient generation that had carburetors and manual chokes.

The panoramic screen “helps to reduce driver eye distraction,” Raisu said, though I can’t imagine how a bright, car-wide color screen could reduce driver distraction. But then, I remember metal dashboards.

“So now I want to tell you about something we call the three A’s: augmentation, autonomy, and affinity. First, we’ll jump into augmentation, creating and customizing a vehicle that is unique to each and every one of us.

“Say for instance, you have a favorite cafe or coffee shop. You can have that populated right here as you see on the NAV screen. Once you click this, you can have a full screen of the maps. Now say you’re like me and sometimes you have issues finding a place—you can zoom out. (He pinched the screen.) See? Everything that’s around you can also do a little 3D rendering of the area.

“Now say you want to change the theme of the vehicle. You can not only change the theme, you change the lighting, the ambient lighting, and the E-motor sound as well. (He made it whir.) So that’s the E-motor sound for Afeela. (Then another, deeper sound) Gran Turismo sounds. (A third sound) This will change it to Spider Man. (Then Raisu changed the cross-dash screen again.) Now we have the Spider Man Across the Spiderverse theme inside the vehicle. Notice that the ambient lighting has changed. We now have the Spider Man theme inside this vehicle.”

Again, all Sony properties. I was trapped in a rolling Sony advertisement.

“Now, let’s say you want to watch a movie.” Raisu put up Gran Turismo, another Sony title. Then he swiped the movie from the middle to his side.

“You have your maps, I have my movie—we’re both happy. But then the movie starts getting good, you want to keep watching. So you pull over and park. I do a little inverse, or a swipe, and bring the movie back to you.”

But there can’t be a movie playing on the screen as a driver is driving, can there?

“Keep in mind, because this is a prototype, we are showcasing all of the technology that it has. So we don’t have those safety things in place, because the prototype is not meant to be driven. When it is ready to be sold to the public, we are talking about having some sort of privacy setting that does not allow the driver to see this screen or at least have it closed to them while driving.”

Maybe something like the screen Jeep and Mercedes have had in recent years that blocked the movie screen from the driver’s view?

“We are talking about having something similar. But that’s something to keep in mind for later. For now, I’ll keep showing you some of the things the vehicle can do.”

Like anime!

“We also have Crunchyroll,” Raisu said.

You ask, “What’s that?” if you’re over 14.

“Crunchyroll is an independently operated joint venture between US-based Sony Pictures Entertainment and Japan’s Aniplex, a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., both subsidiaries of Tokyo-based Sony Group Corporation,” according to crunchyroll.com. So, more Sony content firehosed into your car!

You can also stream your favorite OTT (Over The Top content, which bypasses traditional cable, broadcast, and satellite television platforms and streams content directly to you from the internet.

There’s music, played inside the car via 360 spatial audio that gives you a surround sound field. Raisu played some of that music the young people listen to. The sound was crisp, made enjoyable by its fidelity. I liked it, and it wasn’t even my kind of ancient stadium rock from the ‘70s.

“It’s really good,” Raisu said. “And it’s gonna be 10 times better than this when it’s released.”

There’s also the Stingray Karaoke app that lets you belt out tunes yourself as you drive, though, again, they’d have to figure out how to get the printed lyrics in the cab without you taking your hands off the wheel. HUD, maybe?

And, finally, there is a (Sony) Playstation present in the form of PS Remote Play that allows you to connect remotely to your PlayStation 4 or 5 while you are inside the vehicle. Raisu had a PlayStation 5 controller and started playing Horizon Forbidden West. Not being a gamer myself, it was up to Raisu to tell me that the “graphics look great.”

Can we do all this and drive at the same time?

“Now I want to talk a little bit about autonomy because of course, safety is paramount. Inside the vehicle, we aim to achieve Level 3 autonomy as well as Level 2+ in a variety of situations. So there are a large number of cameras and sensors inside the vehicle; there is a state of the art system on chip with 800 TOPS of power (a lot of power given that TOP means ‘trillions of operations per second,’ or ‘tera operations per second.’) and a machine learning AI inside the vehicle.

“That’s all helping to give you enhanced and improved safety features, as well as enhanced and improved recognition features, recognizing people and vehicles in a variety of situations, such as nighttime driving, and bad weather situations. You also get regular system software updates of that system on chip—that gives you extra peace of mind.”

The Level 3 autonomous driving systems out now from Cadillac and Mercedes both require intense mapping of roads in order to take over control of the car. Will Afeela require that kind of mapping to work and if so, won’t it be limited to only the roads already mapped?

“I haven’t heard that being a requirement for this one. We’ll see when it comes out. But technology is always moving, things are always improving. This comes out two years from now—who knows what things are going to be like two years from now?”

Don’t ask so many questions, okay?

“And then, last but not least, we have affinity. The idea is to be able to work with creators and developers from all around the world, giving you a platform where you can create your own content and run it freely on a field. So ideally, looking at this panoramic screen, it populates everything that says who you are, everything that you care about, right here inside the vehicle.”

Like a Sony Mini Disc!

And then my demo was over and I had to pay for parking. The Century City storefront is now closed, but there’s another one at Westfield Valley Fair in Santa Clara, California, through March 18. There may be others. Watch here.

But is this what “driving” is going to be like in our robotic, dystopian future? We recline in stylized meat tubes while being bombarded with Sony Entertainment-licensed products? Will there be ads? Will we no longer drive? I want my BMW E30 M3! I want to drive! I don’t want to play on a PlayStation! Help me, Mr. Wizard!

Are you ready for the autonomous, branded-content future? Please comment below.