Credit: Sony Honda Mobility

Earlier this month Honda decided to cancel a trio of electric vehicles it was planning to build in the US. And those cancellations are having a ripple effect. Today Sony Honda Mobility—the automaker’s joint venture with the electronics and entertainment company—announced that it won’t bring its EVs to market either.

Although Honda was an early adopter of hybrid technology, it has been left badly lagging when it comes to developing battery-electric cars. The diminutive Honda e might look like the most adorable city car you’ve ever seen, but it struggled to find more than 12,000 buyers in four years across Europe and Japan.

Here in North America, the Prologue has done much better: Honda sold 33,000 in 2024, and another 39,000 last year. But the rebadged GM, which shares a platform with the Chevrolet Blazer, has seen sales implode since the end of the federal clean vehicle tax credit last fall, and it, too, leaves production at the end of the year. An earlier plan to use GM’s battery platform for lower-cost EVs, meant to arrive in 2027, died in late 2023.

Honestly, it has been a surprise that all of those shoes dropped before the Sony Honda Mobility announcement.

The joint venture goes back to 2022. A couple of years earlier, Sony surprised CES by showing off the Vision-S, an electric sedan packed full of its electronic sensors and entertainment platforms, and after exploring the options, it picked Honda as its partner to develop the mechanical engineering and build the car, creating Sony Honda Mobility. The following year we met the Afeela 1, an ungainly name that was picked because “feel” is “at the center of the mobility experience,” as people feel “mobility as an intelligent entity” and mobility feels “people and society using sensing and network IT technologies,” according to the company at the time.

In 2024 they let Ars have a look inside the concept, and at last year’s CES revealed the starting price: a very hefty $89,900. This year, the Afeela 1 was joined by another model, an SUV called the Afeela 2.

But with the scrapping of Honda’s other EVs, Sony Honda Mobility isn’t “able to utilize certain technologies and assets that were originally planned to be provided by Honda,” and without them the project is no longer viable. With no other EVs being built at Honda’s East Liberty plant in Ohio, it makes little sense to continue building Afeela 1s there. Anyone who paid a deposit for the Afeela 1 will receive a full refund, the company says.