Harman Automotive Division: Initiating Technological Leap, Steering towards a New Intelligent Course

Looking at the current automotive industry, "new" is often the term that most easily attracts attention. New cars, new forces, new brands... There is no doubt that the Chinese automotive industry is undergoing unprecedented technological innovation and market transformation. While new players are emerging in an endless stream, those participants who have withstood the test of the market and are deeply rooted in the industry are also constantly leveraging their own advantages, actively transforming and upgrading, and defining the future of the automotive industry. Harman Automotive Division is one of them.

How to become a member who defines the rules in the process of "moving towards the new" is a topic that Harman Automotive Division is constantly exploring in technological innovation and market transformation.

Founded in 1956, Harman Group owns globally renowned brands such as AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon®, Mark Levinson® and Revel®. It provides various intelligent connected vehicle systems, audio-visual products, enterprise automation solutions and Internet of Things technology services for the global automotive market, mass consumer market and professional fields.

Currently, Harman's automotive business accounts for more than half of the group's overall sales share. More than 50 million vehicles worldwide are equipped with Harman's in-car audio and intelligent connected vehicle systems, and its software solutions have covered more than one billion mobile terminals and systems. Nearly 30 well-known domestic and foreign automotive brands have cooperated with Harman, including multinational automakers such as BBA, Stellantis, and General Motors, as well as domestic independent brands such as Geely, GAC, and Great Wall.

Harman owns many globally renowned brands

In early December, 36Kr had an exclusive conversation with Liu Yuzhan, Senior Vice President of Harman Automotive Division Asia-Pacific. Since 2004, he has been deeply involved in the automotive industry, personally experiencing the profound changes in the automotive industry from traditional power to electrification, from functional vehicles to intelligent upgrades, and from single-product competition to ecosystem construction, and has accumulated profound experience in the fields of technology and business development. After joining Harman in 2015, he took root in China, the core area of the global automotive industry transformation, and contributed to Harman's transformation into a technology and innovation-oriented enterprise.

In the video interview of tens of thousands of words, he answered for us the transformation path and future prospects of Harman Automotive Division's "moving towards the new".

Turning Point: Creating Products with the Logic of Consumption

As consumers' demands for digitalization and intelligence continue to rise, the definition of automobiles is being reshaped. People expect it to not only be a means of transportation, but to become an extension of an intelligent life.

"Becoming more and more like consumer electronics" is one of the significant changes in the automotive industry in Liu Yuzhan's eyes.

On the surface, the integration of consumer electronics and the automotive industry seems to be a natural fit: Consumers hope that cars, like smartphones, have a high sense of technology and a convenient experience. However, the differences in the R & D logic between the two have brought considerable challenges. Consumer electronics pursue the speed of product renewal, striving to achieve the transition from product R & D to market circulation in the shortest possible time.

But the R & D model of traditional automotive suppliers is highly dependent on customer needs. After receiving a detailed specification book of hundreds of pages, designing products from scratch is a considerable test for both speed and cost. This development model is to ensure the stability and reliability of automotive products. In order to allow users to enjoy the innovative consumer product experience while ensuring the reliability and stability of automotive products, Harman Automotive Division took the lead in proposing the core strategy of "Consumer-level Experience, Automotive-level Quality".

Under the guidance of this strategy, Harman Automotive Division began to transform three years ago, fully supporting the digitalization process of the automotive industry. It is also based on this strategy that Harman has reorganized its product strategy and launched a new Ready series of products.

This series of products includes Ready Connect (a 5G in-car communication unit that enables product upgradability), Ready Vision (an integrated product of AR-HUD and AR software), Ready Care (an in-cabin sensing and detection system), Ready Upgrade (an intelligent cockpit system that enables comprehensive software and hardware upgrades), Ready Display (a high-definition in-car display using Samsung Neo QLED technology), etc., covering all aspects of the cockpit experience.

Harman Automotive Division Ready series products

In the R & D process of these products, Harman Automotive Division not only actively conducts independent technology research and development, but also cooperates with its parent company Samsung to introduce many mature consumer electronics technologies of Samsung into automobiles. The strong alliance of the two has accelerated the product R & D process, and also broken through the traditional boundaries of the cockpit in technology, bringing a new user experience thinking, and enabling the latest technologies to be safely, quickly and timely applied to vehicles.

Take Harman Automotive Division's Ready Display product as an example. Samsung Group's quantum display technology Neo QLED has to some extent solved the industry pain point that the traditional OLED technology is costly and difficult to be widely popularized. Ready Display covers high-definition and ultra-high-definition displays, including curved screens, which not only meet consumers' demand for larger screens in the car, but also meet the design requirements of automakers for seamless integrated dashboards. This technological improvement brings consumers a clearer and more immersive visual experience, allowing users to enjoy an audio-visual feast like a home theater during driving or riding, and enhancing the pleasure of the overall travel.

In addition to the improvement of hardware performance, Harman Automotive Division also demonstrates a profound insight into the future in-car experience and safety performance in functional design. The newly launched Active Privacy (active privacy) functional module of the Ready Display product can effectively limit the content of the passenger display within the passenger's line of sight, thereby reducing the risk of the driver's distraction. It is revealed that "Ready Display" has received multiple orders worldwide and has also cooperated with local Chinese automakers. The product will be applied to vehicles next year or the year after.

Ready Display product display 

Currently, the Ready series products cover multiple key fields from 5G communication, in-cabin sensing, to augmented reality navigation and display technologies. This not only shows Harman's profound understanding of the future development of the intelligent cockpit, but also reflects its strategic transformation from a traditional supplier to an innovation leader. Just as Liu Yuzhan emphasized, the Ready series products not only cover audio-visual and tactile senses, but are also "consumer-level products centered on the individual and covering the entire cockpit experience".

Ready Connect product display

In addition to many achievements in the field of intelligent connected vehicles, in the process of "moving towards the new", Harman Automotive Division is also constantly exploring new technologies in the field of automotive audio. With its excellent sound quality performance, Harman's automotive audio brands have always been one of the preferred in-car audio systems for many well-known automotive brands worldwide. Harman Automotive Division continuously optimizes in-car audio technology, expanding in-car audio from "sound effect" to a broader auditory experience, and bringing personalized sound enjoyment to consumers through different auditory modes and scenarios. Liu Yuzhan mentioned that Harman Automotive Division has introduced a variety of innovative functions, such as through two-channel simulated surround sound, virtual venue mode, etc., allowing users to experience an immersive atmosphere of an opera house or concert in the car.

With the rapid changes in the industry, Harman is leading the innovation of consumers' driving and riding experience. Through forward-looking technology development, Harman directly communicates with consumers' needs to jointly create a more personalized and intelligent travel experience, allowing consumers to enjoy a more comfortable and pleasant driving and riding pleasure.

Mode Reform: The Philosophy of Innovation in the "Fast-Paced" Era

Nowadays, the iteration speed of automotive products has changed dramatically, the rhythm of technological research and development, and product updates is more rapid, and consumers' interests and preferences are also constantly changing. Liu Yuzhan said that to achieve real value creation, it is necessary to deeply understand consumers' needs and thinking patterns: What kind of products do they need? What kind of technology can really impress them?

In order to find the answers to these questions, Harman Automotive Division flexibly applies the mature development system of the consumer electronics industry to the automotive field. Before product R & D, the R & D team of Harman Automotive Division explores potential market scenarios through a large number of user interactions, generates requirement documents and converts them into development plans. The core is to "look at the market first, look at the users first", and define the product direction with a forward-looking thinking. At the same time, Harman introduces a positive feedback mechanism, providing early prototypes and design concepts to customers and consumers, and optimizing the development direction after collecting feedback.

Harman hopes to help automakers develop products that are truly suitable for consumers through innovative concepts, rather than just completing the delivery. This is a key step for Harman's transformation into a "technology-driven company", and it is also an inevitable choice for enterprises to enhance value in the era of "experience is king".

Liu Yuzhan pointed out that Harman Automotive Division has introduced a "pre-research and development" mode, actively exploring consumers' future needs, conducting product research and development in advance, and defining a series of general standard products. After the research and development is mature, these products can be quickly integrated into the vehicle solution. This mode can shorten the new product development cycle by nearly 50% and reduce the development cost of automakers.

Harman Automotive Division is constantly innovating in the R & D process 

The advantages of the "pre-research and development" mode are vividly reflected in the development of the Ready series products. Traditionally, it takes two to three years to develop a mature product. After the introduction of the Ready series, the goal of Harman Automotive Division is to complete the R & D and delivery of the product within 6 to 12 months. Through standardized interfaces and modular design, "hardware upgradability" becomes possible.

"Fully upgradable" is the core feature of the Ready series products. Through modular design and the idea of software-defined hardware, Harman can quickly complete the verification and optimization of key functions in the early stage of R & D. The self-developed toolchain enables the Ready series products to be more quickly and accurately adapted to the vehicle. This not only optimizes the production and development process of the vehicle manufacturer, but also provides consumers with a smooth experience similar to that of consumer electronics products.

For this reason, Harman Automotive Division has launched many flexible delivery models. Take the digital cockpit solution Ready Upgrade as an example. It can not only adopt the "turnkey project model" to directly deliver all hardware and software to customers. It can also deliver the hardware platform to partners with independent R & D capabilities, while allowing automakers to focus on the optimization of user interaction software; for customers who build their own platform-level products, only hardware and basic driver software are provided.

Ready Upgrade products meet consumers' new demand for "fully upgradable"

The launch of Ready Upgrade also marks an important step forward for the automotive industry in cockpit intelligence and product update methods. Harman Automotive Division has gone further in the scalability solution that combines hardware and software, providing cross-model and cross-version solutions for automakers, demonstrating its innovative philosophy in the fast-paced industry.

Modern automotive audio technology has also broken through the traditional boundaries. In addition to providing a more personalized listening experience through a series of innovations such as surround sound simulation and virtual venue settings, Harman has more breakthroughly combined audio technology with the functions of the intelligent cockpit to develop more new functions: For example, combining sound with assisted driving can allow the driver to perceive from which direction the outside vehicle is coming, etc., thereby further enhancing driving safety and fun, opening up an innovative space for the combination of audio technology and cockpit experience, and comprehensively enhancing the user experience, making sound an indispensable part of the intelligent cockpit. 

R & D Orientation: Foreseeing the Future in China

In the wave of global automotive industry transformation, the role of the Chinese market is becoming increasingly important. On the one hand, the Chinese market has a huge consumer base and diverse demands, which has led to an unprecedented speed of technological iteration; on the other hand, fierce market competition and price wars also require enterprises to face the challenge of balancing efficiency and innovation.

When talking about the "price war" in the automotive industry, Liu Yuzhan straightforwardly stated that a highly intense price war is actually disorderly competition, and emphasized that "