Sony will soon be putting some focus on driverless cars.

The electronics company recently made a 100 million-yen investment in ZMP (over $800,000 USD), a Japanese startup company that makes robot cars.

Sony will try to partner with ZMP to create a self-driving car, CNBC reports. Sony has expertise with sensors and ZMP has expertise with robotics. The two companies hope to combine their efforts to compete with Google and Apple, who are both said to be working on driverless cars themselves.

Success in other areas of electronics has escaped Sony as less consumers are buying their TV's and smartphones. Sony does own the market with camera sensors, AutoConnectedCar reports, which are extremely important in cameras.

Smartphones sell at a huge volume -- over 1 billion per year. In a few years, only about 100 million cars will be sold per year.

The cameras in a car are much more expensive than those in a phone though. Analysts predict that by 2020, 102 million automotive cameras will be shipped.

Shigeo Ohba, Sony's general manager of the image sensor business, predicts that demand for automotive sensors will expand greatly between 2017 and 2030.

"We have to be No. 1 in automotive sensors" by the time self-driving cars are expected to hit the roads in early to mid-2020s, Ohba said. 

Sony's sensors are in about 40 percent of today's smartphones worldwide, according to research from Techo Systems Research.

For cars, Sony's sensors are only in about five percent of cars worldwide.

Sony has some catching up to do, but they are confident that with their knowledge of sensors, they can develop a self-driving car.

"We were latecomers in smartphone cameras but we still created this market. Now we can do the same with automotive cameras," Shoichi Kitayama, Sony's general manager heading the automotive team said.

Sony has already announced that it will start mass-producing image sensors for automotive cameras. The cameras will be able to display high-quality color pictures even when there is no moon in the sky.

Do you think Sony will succeed with this self-driving car? Leave us a comment below.