At CES 2025 this week, Garmin unveiled its latest automotive infotainment and electronics solution for automakers. The Unified Cabin 2025, selected as a CES 2025 Innovation Award Honoree, is the latest iteration delivering a digital cockpit experience to four seating positions and adds a new ultra-wide front display, bringing the total screen count to six.

“Garmin Unified Cabin has resonated strongly with global automakers because there is nothing else like it on the market today,” said Matt Munn, Executive Vice President and Managing Director for Garmin Automotive OEM. “This scalable solution can be customized to meet the needs of premium and mainline brands and includes a growing number of cabin electronics running off a single system-on-chip.”

The company has added many new and unique features to the Android Automotive Operating System and is demonstrating some industry-first capabilities at CES.

“We continue to showcase our latest technologies and features with an all-in-one Unified Cabin prototype ‘demo buck’ because the Garmin story is always about smart, cost-effective integration,” said Craig Puder, Vice President of Garmin Automotive Engineering Solutions. “We don’t just develop separate technologies, we develop them to work together as one integrated solution for a superior experience, lower cost, and a product that is more than the sum of its parts.”

The updated concept is said to set an industry standard for immersive, personalized HMI (human-machine interface) theming and can be downloaded and installed at run-time to all displays including the instrument cluster. Changes to 3D models and scenery, as well as changes to cabin lighting in each zone, enhance the in-vehicle experience.

Generative AI supports theme customization based on user input and enables a personalized voice assistant for every seat in the car. The AI assistant is trained to know the vehicle and help users operate it.

UWB (ultra-wideband) technology detects which seats are occupied and classifies them as a child or adult based on breathing patterns and helps ensure a sleeping child is never forgotten in the backseat. Updated and cost-optimized, AutoLink uses UWB technology to automatically and intuitively connect a user’s phone, headphones, or game controller to whatever seat they choose.

A new user interface brings core Unified Cabin functions to an intuitive 3D exterior and interior model. Enhanced views of both rear and front blind spots make intuitive use of the ultrawide display for an unparalleled level of situational awareness.

Unique audio streams are distributed to each seat’s headrest speakers or to Bluetooth headphones, giving each user their own audio and video experience.

Also new are app and screen sharing capabilities to offer better shared entertainment experiences and the app lets a phone act as a remote control for any display. The upgraded automotive-grade displays, including an ultrawide format example, are provided by Tianma Microelectronics. They feature multi-display bonding to custom AutoGrade 2 Corning Gorilla Glass for automotive interiors.

The updated Unified Cabin is improved by Garmin’s fully integrated domain controller with a single control module (SoC). This was enabled by an expanded collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies and the use of its Snapdragon Cockpit Elite platform to deliver intuitive and immersive entertainment experiences across all vehicle displays to facilitate the software-defined vehicle architecture.

Garmin and Qualcomm first teamed in 2019 to deliver production domain controllers for a major OEM. In 2022, the companies collaborated on the first iteration of the Garmin Unified Cabin based on the Snapdragon Cockpit Platform, and since worked on digital cockpit solutions as part of a multi-year project, showcasing cutting-edge features through the integration of various peripherals and displays to create a multi-zone, multi-user architecture within the vehicle, complemented by software components, to deliver a comprehensive infotainment, digital cluster, and entertainment system.

The strengthened collaboration with Qualcomm delivers a first-of-its-kind automotive OEM solution and feature set with an unparalleled level of capability, scalability, and integration, according to Munn.

“As one of our most powerful automotive platforms, the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite, is designed to meet modern vehicle demands with natural language processing, predictive maintenance, and adaptive user interfaces, raising the bar for in-vehicle technology with immersive multimedia, optimized gaming, and advanced 3D graphics,” said Nakul Duggal, Group Manager, Automotive, Industrial, and Cloud, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

The enhanced onboard generative AI enabled by Snapdragon Cockpit Elite’s dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) supports theme customization, voice assistant, and many of other new features. Powered by Qualcomm’s highest-performing Oryon CPU and an improved Adreno GPU, the platform is designed to bring leading-edge in-vehicle experiences and on-device AI to all tiers of software-defined vehicles.