Tech occasions aren’t about PC parts or wearables, as the Honda Space Hub booth at CES 2024 demonstrated. Two concept cars were on display that gave me such a Cyberpunk 2077 vibe that I spent an hour in the game checking out the various vehicles. before coming to an undeniable conclusion: Honda’s vision of cars in the short and long term is more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk 2077.
Futuristic-looking concept cars are the norm at automotive events, and the vast majority of them follow the same pattern: sleek, angular lines with as few practical winks as humanly possible.
Honda’s offerings at this year’s CES event didn’t support this long-standing trend, but as soon as I saw them, my brain went into video game mode. Specifically, the Cyberpunk 2077 mode.
Imagine a full hour driving around Night City checking out every car I can see and comparing them to the Honda 0 Series concept cars. And after all this time, something caught my attention: if I had to bet a giant sum on which cars Al would sport Just like in 50 years, my money would be in Honda.
Having owned a few cars in the past, Honda cars were utilitarian, but lately the models are becoming more and more futuristic, especially in the interiors.
However, they still seem like cars of the present, not something that falls into the realm of science fiction. Even concept cars are designed to have that vision of the future, but more so for what could become the norm in, say, a decade.
Both demos, which are part of Honda’s 0 Series electric vehicles, suggest we say goodbye to door handles, mirrors and ease of access. Instead, we can expect mirror-like surfaces, panels with seamless gaps, and RGB lighting throughout.
On the contrary, CD Projekt’s vision for the future, especially for a city that spans the full gamut of wealth, suggests that automobiles will continue to play in many of the facets we see today.
In fact, many of them wouldn’t seem out of position at this point, which made me think that Honda’s concept cars might be exactly what the 2077 cars would end up being.
I know cyberpunk is intended to be a combination of past, present and future, but a true cyberpunk world, five decades from now, will look much more like the examples presented at CES than CD Projekt’s designs.
Companies like Tesla and JLR have already supplied boot door handles on several of their models, and the same goes for mirrors on some Audi cars. While Cyberpunk 2077 evokes a long history that still recalls a bygone era, Honda’s designs seem more suited to a global part a century from now.
Unfortunately, the chances of it still being around until then are kind of slim, but part of me hopes that the 2077 cars will be more like CD Projekt’s than Honda’s, I think it’ll be the other way around. But let’s hope that the more dystopian facets of Cyberpunk 2077 don’t come true, right?
Nick, Gaming and Computers met in 1981, with a love affair that began with a Sinclair ZX81 kit and a book on ZX Basic. He eventually became a professor of physics and computer science, but in the late 1990s it was time to start writing for a long-defunct British tech site. He then did the same at Madonion, helping to write the support files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a brief stint at Beyond3D. com, Nick joined Futuremark (renamed MadOnion) full-time, as editor-in-chief of its games and hardware division, YouGamers. After the site’s closure, he became a professor of engineering and computer science for many years, but had no taste for writing. 4 years out of TechSpot. com and over a hundred lengthy articles on anything. He openly admits to being too obsessed with GPUs and open-world RPGs, but who is rarely very much in those days?
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