Honda And Sony’s Afeela Brand Is Making An Inevitable SUV

There’s a bit of an established pattern when launching an upstart tech-driven EV brand: get everyone’s attention with a swoopy saloon car, then play it safe with an SUV as your second model. Tesla did it (if you ignore the low-volume Lotus-based Roadster), Lucid did it, and now Afeela, the car-making tie-up between Honda and tech-giant Sony, is doing it too.

It’s revealed what it’s currently simply calling the Afeela Prototype 2026, which is debuting today at the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and it takes the styling cues of the brand’s first production model, the Afeela 1, and translates them into the sort of sloping-backed coupe-SUV the world remains obsessed with.

That’s largely all we know about it at the moment, but we suspect it’ll use the same underpinnings as the saloon – a new platform consisting of a 91kWh battery pack and a dual-motor, all-wheel drive 493bhp powertrain.

It’ll likely tick all the same tech-forward EV boxes as the Afeela 1 too. They include the inevitable integration of many screens, an ultra-fast on-board computer and all the fanciest driver-assist tech. And of course, pretty much every paragraph in Afeela’s press release mentions AI, which is said to be the overarching power behind all these systems.

Afeela says it plans to develop the SUV prototype into a production model, with a view to getting it on sale in 2028 at the earliest, when it’ll inevitably be called the Afeela 2 if the first car’s Polestar-esque naming structure is anything to go by.

Speaking of the Afeela 1, reservations for it in its tech-friendly debut market of California opened last January, and with trial production beginning at Honda’s plant in Ohio in the autumn, the first customer deliveries are scheduled for this year. Sales will expand to Arizona in 2027, when the first cars for the Japanese market are also set to arrive.

Back to the SUV, then – given that both the prototype and production version of the Afeela 1 are already featured, how long before it makes its way to Gran Turismo 7?