Samsung's subsidiary HARMAN is making a major push into autonomous driving and centralized vehicle compute with a €1.5 billion acquisition of ZF Group's ADAS business. The deal brings together leading autonomous driving tech, smart sensors, and software platforms with HARMAN's digital cockpit expertise. With closing expected in late 2026, it signals how the auto industry is rapidly consolidating around integrated platforms where safety, navigation, and in-cabin experiences converge in software-defined vehicles.
HARMAN, the automotive and audio technology unit of Samsung Electronics, just scooped up the keys to ZF Group's autonomous driving business for €1.5 billion. The deal, announced today, gives HARMAN one of the industry's most advanced ADAS platforms right as automakers race to ship what they're calling software-defined vehicles. This isn't just another tech acquisition. It's a bet that the future of the car looks nothing like the present, and whoever controls the unified computing stack that ties together autonomous driving, cockpit displays, and in-cabin experiences wins.
The acquisition brings ZF's complete ADAS portfolio under HARMAN's roof: automotive compute solutions, smart cameras, radar sensors, and the underlying software that turns all of it into functioning autonomous capabilities. About 3,750 ZF employees across Europe, the Americas, and Asia will transition to HARMAN when the deal closes, likely in the second half of 2026 after regulatory approvals. It's a complex carve-out of a major business from a sprawling industrial conglomerate, and it's exactly the kind of move that signals the automotive industry hitting an inflection point.
"The industry is at an inflection point where safety, intelligence and in-cabin experience must come together through a unified computing architecture," HARMAN's CEO Christian Sobottka told Samsung's newsroom. The statement reads like corporate speak, but it captures something real happening in automotive engineering right now. For years, the safety systems, driver assistance features, and the entertainment and climate controls lived in separate domains. Different chips, different software, different teams managing them. That's ending.
HARMAN's play is to merge ZF's ADAS stack with its own Digital Cockpit platform on a single, centralized compute architecture. Imagine a vehicle where the system perceiving the road ahead for autonomous driving isn't siloed from the system managing the audio experience. When the car detects a pothole ahead, it could pulse the seat. When it recognizes an emergency vehicle, it could modulate the music. When it's navigating in heavy traffic, it could offer personalized context-aware driving assistance. These aren't necessarily features anyone asked for yet, but they become possible when everything runs on one platform instead of five.
