Sony just drove its concept car Afeela with a DualSense controller at CES 2024

At CES 2024, Sony just drove the latest version of its concept car, Afeela, with its flagship video game controller. This was, theoretically, a fairly benign display of brand synergy, but you be the judge of whether it was a good idea.  

Izumi Kawanishi, president of the joint venture Sony Honda Mobility introduced the latest iteration of the tech he’s been working on by busting out a DualSense controller — y’know, the thing you use to play Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart — and saying “I’d like to show you an aspect of the software behind the vehicle.”

Then some soothing piano music played and Kawanishi piloted the apparently road-ready, multi-ton vehicle onto the stage with the controller, Gran Turismo-style, in a room full of squashable human beings. 

This all starts at the 27-minute mark:

Kawanashi then reassured the crowd that this was just a tech demo — a DualShock-enabled Sony car isn’t coming to a showroom near you quite yet — and then he launched into a speech about AI and the future of mobility, featuring visuals that emphasized the camera-rich concept car’s AI vision system. At Sony Honda Mobility, he said, his team believes “that software can define new function and value,” that they “aim to revolutionize how people move,” and that they plan to “leverage the connection between the real and virtual.”

“Although it looks weird, everything is recreated in the virtual space,” Kawanashi said. In short, we all know Sony excels at video games, so they want you to imagine all the ways this can lead to some sort of wonderful new driving experience. 

Let’s be generous for a moment: The DualSense controller, which is once again a gaming device largely designed to be used by children, does have bells and whistles that make it a potential candidate for automotive applications. Haptic feedback provided by voice coil motors in the palm grips could make it so you can feel the nuances and imperfections in the road, and sense weather conditions. Force feedback — different responses to different sorts of tension and pressure — could, when applied to car-driving, suggest the dynamics of a gas or break pedal in actual use. 

That’s all well and good, but if you’re like me, seeing someone use a game controller in the life-or-death context of heavy machinery just calls to mind the third-party game controller used by Stockton Rush, the CEO of submarine tourism company Oceangate to control the submersible that went missing and tragically imploded last June while the world looked on in horror.

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Last month, two million Teslas were recalled due to defects with Tesla’s driver assist system (which you may know by its misleading brand name, “Autopilot”), and the laws around cars not driven in the conventional way are currently in flux. It’s simply not the most pleasant moment, in my view, to roll a vehicle onto a stage with the same thing I use to play Fortnite.