Lynk & Co teams up with Harman Kardon: “We saw a lot of synergies there”

Audio and automotive are about as intertwined as two things can be. A solid sound system can make or break a sale. Even if it’s not up to scratch, there are hordes of aftermarket solutions for any brand and any budget ready to give the goods. Audio is important in car design, both sonically and visually.

For the best part of a century car makers have competed with other noises making their way into the cabin, chiefly engine noise, but the commercialisation of electric powertrains has changed things. Ahh, sweet silence. Even with tyre roar and wind, it is an altogether serene envionrment that lends itself well to theatre-rivalling audio.

Off the shelf solutions are fine – a bit like dumping a set of amps on stage – but wouldn’t a more bespoke solution be better? Enter: the strategic partnership. We have covered similar situations before, but Lynk & Co’s tie-up with Harman Kardon is a little different given that solutions have become standard for series-produced vehicles, not concepts. And for multiple models, it turns out.

While the intial meeting between both sides was perfectly amicable, both were a little defensive with the reputation of their brands front of mind. But as the conversation went on, it became clear that their brand values were remarkably similar and from there, the relationship flourished.

Raphael Glück, senior industrial designer at Harman Kardon (far left in the gallery above) explains that he and his team were brought in at an early stage during the design of the Lynk & Co 08, a different experience to what he had been used to previously.

They had worked with other car brands, but not like this. Now they had the opportunity to help define which technologies were integrated and where from the get go. On the other side, Lynk & Co’s head of interior design Jonathan Tatum found that this opened new opportunities from a design side, showing what was possible and how they could push the boundaries a little.

This can be seen in the implementation of the side speakers in the door cards to the central unit on the dash, the latter of which stands out in the best possible way. We saw a similar approach with the Z10 sedan, which drew inspiration from a spacecraft landing on a lunar surface.

Here, that seems to have been taken to the next level. The speaker system itself is a sculpture that sits separately to the rest of the IP. The Harman logo peeks out from the far corner, with the brand’s distinctive pixellated mesh fading into the rest of the speaker cover. The same effect can be seen in the door cards, elevated with the inclusion of back lighting that ties into the horizontal light bar across the dash.

It shows a slightly different strategy to the conventional means of speaker integration: most sit flush and are given a metallic housing, a pop of bling so to speak. The execution on the 08 feels more like a home cinema set up, with surround-sound speakers strategically positioned to frame and accent the room.

There were plenty of opportunities for Harman Kardon and Lynk & Co to work together as the 08 counts a total of 23 speakers throughout the cabin. The result seems to have been well recieved, with a Red Dot design award coming not long after its initial launch. Judges praised “the fusion of physical design and user experience” and noted how the “dynamically-designed” audio components had “enhanced the impression of the interior.”

Clearly, effort went towards balancing how these to brands sit together. Harman Kardon branding is generally in view but remains subtle, accenting the design but not drowning it out. At the same time, this is a partnership to be celebrated, so the logo is not hidden entirely. “We obviously don’t want to hide the fact that there is a high quality system in the car,” points out Tatum.

The 08 is a plug-in hybrid SUV that is said to offer up to 200km pure electric range alongside its combustion engine. The model is already available in China and is due to launch in Europe later this month; CDN will be on the ground and will report back from Gothenburg (where the majority of the design took place).