This function could make any automobile sound like a spaceship

Automotive shopping for in 2026 is a bit… properly… troublesome. With so many manufacturers below the identical company umbrella, sharing design languages, components, and powertrains, it might really feel like most automobiles on the lot immediately include a considerably puny 4-cylinder turbo engine, and all sound the identical. The unhappy half right here is that the assertion will not be all that far faraway from actuality.

I’ve two automobiles in my storage proper now. One is a compact four-seater SUV for my accomplice, and the opposite is my seven-seater VW Atlas, or as I name it, the ‘veedubya’. Each are geared up with small 4-bangers, which do, in equity, ship very completely different quantities of energy. Nevertheless, they each sound the very same, and personally, I feel that ought to change. Fortunately, so do the sound engineers at Harman Automotive, who’ve devised a technique to make each automobile sound precisely as a driver needs it to.

Harman is stuffed with sound wave wizards

And their newest challenge impressed me most of all

If you have not learn any of my earlier work protecting every thing that I noticed at Harman Automotive’s current EXPLORE occasion, do not sweat it. You are solely lacking out on a few of the other cool features they’re working on. This, although, was by far the best that I noticed on the occasion, and it is due largely to the truth that we really received to strive it out in a take a look at automobile that Harman stored on-site.

The general sound challenge is dubbed HALOsonic Electrical Sound Synthesis, colloquially recognized (by me) as HALOsonic. In case you personal a car with JBL, Harman Kardon, AKG, Mark Levinson, and actually most different upper-tier automotive sound techniques, then Harman has already been at work in your car. HALOsonic is the following step up from what we see on most street automobiles immediately, and it entails just a few audio methods to personalize your driving expertise.

Make your automobile sound nevertheless you want

Personalization is the secret

Credit score: Harman/Pocket-lint

On the HALOsonic show, we had been proven that drivers might regulate the way in which their automobile sounds within the cabin by means of just a few settings screens. The function permits drivers to make the ‘exhaust word’ sound nevertheless they like and pumps it into the cabin by means of fastidiously tuned speaker techniques. Whether or not you wish to make your SUV sound extra sporty, your two-seater extra throaty, and even make it sound such as you’re Han Solo piloting the Millennium Falcon, the HALOsonic system can deal with it.

You’ll be able to even regulate the depth of the sound, so if you wish to, say, sound like an X-Wing fighter versus the Falcon, you may make that occur. The purpose, although, is that HALOsonic can utterly change the texture of what, by most accounts, is in any other case a boring automobile. My puny 4-cylinder not has to sound like itself, and if it feels like that is considerably gimmicky, I encourage you to search out an instance of any automotive firm that is not shifting to smaller, quieter, turbocharged engines. Most have already got, in actual fact.

You may need seen it earlier than, however not this manner

All of this could sound acquainted, but it surely’s the packaging that makes a distinction

Credit score: Harman/Pocket-lint

Whereas Tesla and comparable EV firms have toyed round with ‘exhaust notes’ earlier than, Harman does it a bit in a different way. As a substitute of creating these options model-specific, Harman’s objective is to promote road-ready gear en masse to producers. Which means all of those options could be utilized to any automobile geared up with Harman’s infotainment software program, and because of this, can simply be dropped into no matter challenge producers have going on the present juncture.

This retains manufacturing prices down, in step with their objective for the Ready StreamShare platform, and makes the case for HALOsonic all of the extra compelling. Harman’s audio platforms are already in loads of manufacturing automobiles, and the rolodex of potential prospects seems to be set to develop within the years to come back.

Infotainment is the following greatest automotive battleground

The battle for one of many most-viewed screens in your arsenal is heating up

There’s just one display in your life that’s nonetheless a wide-open battleground for management, and it is the one in your automobile. With firms like General Motors breaking off their relationships with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, third-party firms with deeper automotive ties, like Harman, are ready within the wings to supplyinfotainment providers which can be extra tailor-made to the automotive person than what is basically an extension of the cellular phone in drivers’ pockets.

There are many key bullet factors that warrant consideration going into Q1 of 2026, however other than another impending chip shortage, infotainment at giant is trending towards a kitchen-table difficulty for producers by way of what they need and wish from their very own manufacturing lineups within the coming mannequin years.