Faisal Ghaffar 
Sony Team Corp. CEO Kenichiro Yoshida walked on stage there at Macworld Expo Vegas in initial 2020, announcing the once hinge: the Japanese electronics manufacturer was entering the electric car race.
The led light on the stage faded as Yoshida completed his 30-minute speech, and a glistening grille surfaced from the shadows. As a stylish, Sony-branded car flipped onto the stage, the CEO held his hands up.
“The next global trend will be mobility,” Sony’s CEO predicted, referring to mobile phones over the last century.
With Yoshida’s announcement, the 76-year-old Japanese conglomerate joined the growing list of new tech behemoths making plans for forays into the automobile industry. As automobiles are becoming more electric, independent device and web-connected, the motion is attracting a slew of newbies, most notably Apple Inc. including its secretive Apple Car, all betting that they will have the innovations to succeed.
While many elected car manufacturers have played down Big Tech’s jockeying, Yoshida’s 62-year-old push earned him an improbable fan at the time in Asia: Toshihiro Mike, who’d been running Honda Motor Co., Ltd. research and innovation at the time.
Honda had invested the most aggressively in EVs of any Japanese automaker, aiming for a complete phase-out of combustion-engine vehicles sold by 2040. Honda saw slightly earlier the possibility of cooperation with Sony on consumer devices, automated driving sensors, and apps to make a distinction between new designs and add value to the reduced company of car manufacturing.
Mike had spent several years trying to woo Sony’s upper executives behind the action sequences, trying to sell those on his dream of the company’s synergistic benefits, according to people who are familiar with the official’s approach. When Mike, 60, had become Honda’s CEO the year before, those entreaties gained new importance. Proposals for a partnership began to consolidate around the end of 2021 after just a series of sessions between management and personnel from the businesses’ chief execs to engineers.
This ultimately resulted in the two publicizing plans to form a new corporation to create and sell upcoming electric cars. Two iconic businesses, both emblems of Japan’s postwar economic recovery, we’re teaming up.
“Companies from entirely different industry sectors have diverse cultures and source materials of value, “Mike said in an April interview about Chevy’s partnership with Sony. “There is this concept that we could collaborate to create a chemical process.”
