This characteristic could make any automotive sound like a spaceship

Automotive shopping for in 2026 is a bit… nicely… 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 in the present day include a considerably puny 4-cylinder turbo engine, and all sound the identical. The unhappy half right here is that the assertion isn’t 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 automotive sound precisely as a driver needs it to.

Harman is filled with sound wave wizards

And their newest challenge impressed me most of all

If you have not learn any of my earlier work protecting all the pieces 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 good 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 automotive that Harman saved on-site.

The general sound challenge is dubbed HALOsonic Electrical Sound Synthesis, colloquially identified (by me) as HALOsonic. Should 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 highway automobiles in the present day, and it entails a couple of audio tips to personalize your driving expertise.

Make your automotive sound nevertheless you want

Personalization is the secret

Credit score: Harman/Pocket-lint

On the HALOsonic show, we have been proven that drivers may regulate the best way their automotive sounds within the cabin by a couple of settings screens. The characteristic permits drivers to make the ‘exhaust observe’ sound nevertheless they like and pumps it into the cabin by fastidiously tuned speaker techniques. Whether or not you need 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 fully change the texture of what, by most accounts, is in any other case a boring automotive. My puny 4-cylinder not has to sound like itself, and if it seems 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, actually.

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

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

Credit score: Harman/Pocket-lint

Whereas Tesla and comparable EV corporations have toyed round with ‘exhaust notes’ earlier than, Harman does it a bit in a different way. As a substitute of constructing these options model-specific, Harman’s purpose is to promote road-ready tools en masse to producers. Because of this all of those options will be utilized to any automotive geared up with Harman’s infotainment software program, and consequently, can simply be dropped into no matter challenge producers have going on the present juncture.

This retains manufacturing prices down, consistent with their purpose 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 screen in your life that’s nonetheless a wide-open battleground for management, and it is the one in your automotive. With corporations like General Motors breaking off their relationships with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, third-party corporations with deeper automotive ties, like Harman, are ready within the wings to offerinfotainment providers which might be extra tailor-made to the automotive consumer than what is basically an extension of the cellphone in drivers’ pockets.

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