Despite not actually having any vehicles in production, the Afeela car brand, founded as a collaboration between Honda and Sony, makes its music video debut today. That’s because the car is appearing in the animated video of one of Korea’s biggest virtual pop stars, Apoki.
The virtual K-pop star’s first single of the year, “Mood V5” was released today. In it, the animated “artist” features the Afeela concept car, that was first unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year.
Apoki is described as a “rabbit-like being living somewhere in space,” and is the creation of AFUN Interactive, a Korean tech startup. The company says that when it saw Afeela’s first concept at its introduction at CES, the car’s “message of pursuing mobility innovation” resonated with it.
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It, therefore, started reaching out to Sony Honda Mobility, the joint venture behind Afeela, to collaborate. For its part, the automaker says that it “acknowledged Apoki’s innovative and artistic creativity among other virtual artists,” in a press release, which is what led it to agree to the partnership.
In June 2022, Apoki was ranked as Korea’s number one virtual influencer by virtualhumans.org. More than simply animated, AFUN Interactive says that the creation of her music videos requires the use of precision CG to perform K-pop music and dance.
Afeela, meanwhile, revealed an electric sedan concept vehicle at CES in January, which it says previews a real car it plans to start delivering in 2025. While Honda will be handling the engineering of the car, Sony will be behind its technology.
The tech brand plans to fill Afeela’s vehicles with cloud-based software, Level 3 autonomy, and plenty of entertainment options thanks to a display that stretches across the entirety of the dash. The automaker could reportedly even integrate the PlayStation 5 into the vehicle.
