Dolby’s ongoing bid to extend the dominance of its immersive Dolby Atmos surround sound audio format beyond cinemas and living rooms into the automobile world has just taken another big step forward with the announcement that the format is going to be added to Google’s Android Auto platform.
Revealed initially in strangely throwaway fashion on Google’s latest (May 12) Android Auto blog post, alongside news that the service will also be bringing full HD video at 60Hz refresh rates to supporting cars later this year, Dolby has now also gone on record to confirm that its premium sound format is indeed coming to Android Auto via supported apps and cars, starting with Genesis, Mahindra, Mercedes-Benz, Renault, Skoda, Tata, Volvo and – hot on the heels of Dolby’s announcement that Dolby Atmos speaker systems would be going into the new generation of its 7 Series cars – BMW.
The Android Auto platform reaches millions of drivers globally (Google estimates that there are more than 250 million Android Auto-compatible cars on the road today), so it has the potential to massively expand the reach of Dolby Atmos content throughout the car world.
In fact, as Dolby points out, Dolby Atmos’s adoption by Android Auto provides another major signal that immersive audio is now rapidly moving from being a premium feature to becoming an expectation in the car world, as consumers increasingly expect premium entertainment features to exist seamlessly across all their devices and entertainment ecosystems.
Dolby Atmos can already be enjoyed in cars via various streaming services and platforms, of course, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Audible, and Apple CarPlay. Adding Android Auto to the roster of Dolby Atmos sources, though, will open the sound format up to a substantially wider user base. The move also, of course, provides more encouragement for car makers to adopt Dolby Atmos sound as a key trade-up now that the demand for premium in-car audio experiences is so significantly on the rise.
If you’ve yet to experience Dolby Atmos sound and so don’t understand what all the fuss is about, the dry explanation is that it’s a so-called object-based sound format that creates a 3D sound scape into which sound effects are placed, rather than sounds just appearing to come from the location of your speakers as happens with traditional sound systems. What this means in experiential terms is that Dolby Atmos puts you at the heart of a music track or movie mix, creating a vastly more immersive listening environment. And having heard Dolby Atmos working over a premium car speaker systems on a number of occasions now, I can confirm that in some ways the compact and enclosed space of a car is an ideal place to experience Dolby Atmos’s charms.
Neither Google nor Dolby have stated exactly when Dolby Atmos will go live on Android Auto, but it’s suggested on the Google blog that all the new Android Auto features discussed there will appear before the end of 2026.
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