When picking a car, you tend to consider a lot of different options. What kind of trim would you like? Do you want a bigger engine or a more efficient one? How about sound? If you’re the kind of person that like a high-quality sound system, then the future of car audio might set your pulse racing.

Surround Sound

Immersive sound has been a big part of automotive offerings for some time, with manufacturers teaming up with companies like Bang & Olufsen, Burmester, and Meridien – to name a few. However, it seems as though to truly impress customers who like their sound systems, cars are being filled to the brim with speakers in an effort to outdo the competition. Will there come a time when there’s simply no room left to add speakers?

Moving Forward

It seems as though Continental, the brand normally known for their car tires, has been working on something that could change the future of car audio forever. Their new Ac2ated technology is turning the vehicle into the speaker, in an effort to save energy, space, and even the overall weight of the car. The technology relies on actuators on a surface on the vehicle that then gives off vibrations to create sound from the surface it rests on. This would mean no need for speakers, as the whole vehicle would effectively become the speaker!

Concert Hall Vibes

This principle is the same thing as used by most string instruments, like acoustic guitars and violins, but also works on plastic and glass. Continental believes that the result is car audio that sounds like a concert hall in your vehicle. While it’s not a new or rare technology, this is the first time it has been used to replace speakers in a car.

This could completely revolutionize the sound system in cars going forward and with the company hard at work on this tech, it might not be long before we see it come to life.

James Bond had the coolest gadgets and we could not stop talking about them. They would get him out of the craziest situation with such suave and you could not help but ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over it. But the coolest one among them was Vanquish, the Aston Martin that the 007 agent drove in Die Another Day. However, we all knew that it was all fiction, back then. But what if we told you that the vanishing car exists in real life too?

Not So Realistic

Daniel Craig took his final bow with No Time To Die as the James Bond. And people will always remember his films as more realistic. However, realism was not the best way to describe the 2002 film Die Another Day. Even Chris Corbould, the veteran special effects supervisor for about 15 Bond movies said that they took it too far with the inept CGI of the famous (more like infamous) invisible car. In an interview, Corbould said that he wasn’t very keen on it either but went along with creating the CGI for the Aston Martin anyway.

The Irony

As crazy as the idea of a vanishing car may be, the technology of invisibility was based on reality. It was inspired by some work done by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA). DERA may be defunct now but it was part of the UK’s Ministry of Defence. Scriptwriters Neil Purvis and Robert Wade had made this discovery as they were researching for this film.

When Reel Become Real

Corbould has always found it amusing to see how reality eventually replicates the gadgets used in the James Bond films. BAE Systems is one of the largest defense and aerospace contractors in the world. They are working on this very invisibility technology. Alongside the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration, they aim to create a system known as Adaptiv, which will be used on tank fleets.