In a little over a year, Sony Honda Mobility expects to launch the Afeela 1, a battery-electric sedan that’s been very visibly half a decade in the making. When I ask CEO Yasuhide Mizuno about the challenges the joint venture has faced in its brief history, he talks about the work to swiftly integrate Sony’s software with Honda’s hardware, to realize this unique union of competencies and bring it to market in the shortest possible time. However, Mizuno says the company’s “number one” challenge lies in the year ahead, and I can see why.
“We’re having deliveries happen one year from now, so we’re going to go to production,” Mizuno told me in an interview through an interpreter at CES earlier this week in Las Vegas. “Now, we want to make that production and hit our goals, but, while we’re doing that we still want to keep that level of quality. That’s probably the number one challenge for us at this point.”
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