Thomas Irawan and Christian Sobottka

HARMAN is expanding beyond the digital cockpit into ADAS, central compute, and SDV software. With the ZF ADAS acquisition pending, what the company needs now is the execution to pull different technologies and organizations into a single production business. The hire of Thomas Irawan — who built his ADAS and Cross-Domain Computing credentials at Bosch before leading ETAS's push into SDV and open-source collaboration — points to where HARMAN is headed next.

By Sang Min Han _ han@autoelectronics.co.kr
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HARMAN has hired Thomas Irawan, President and Chairman of the Board of Management at ETAS, as Chief Operating Officer and President Designate of HARMAN Automotive. Irawan joins on October 1 and will be responsible for the day-to-day execution and performance of HARMAN Automotive, overseeing Intelligent Cockpit, Car Audio, Connectivity, Automotive Engineering Services, and the company's global customer organization. Once the pending acquisition of ZF's ADAS business closes, that unit is expected to fall under his operational responsibility as well.
Put the timing next to the résumé, and the appointment reads differently.
Over the past two years, HARMAN has moved quickly beyond the digital cockpit into ADAS, central compute, and SDV software. Irawan built his career on ADAS and Cross-Domain Computing at Bosch, then led SDV and vehicle software at ETAS. The business HARMAN is building and the career Irawan has built overlap in more places than one.
Intelligent Cockpit, Connectivity, and Car Audio remain HARMAN Automotive's core business. But its recent moves suggest the company has been preparing for more than incremental upgrades to existing products.
In 2024, HARMAN pushed further into productizing its cockpit domain controllers around Ready Upgrade — pre-integrated hardware and software in place of a from-scratch build for every OEM program, cutting development time while letting features keep evolving after launch.
At the same time, Ready CQuence extended HARMAN's reach into vehicle software development and validation. The company began moving into not just the software consumers experience inside the car, but the process of building, testing, and shipping it — the groundwork for turning a cockpit supplier into an SDV platform company.
That direction hardened into architecture starting in 2025.
HARMAN worked with HL Klemove on a Central Compute Platform that combines the Ready Upgrade cockpit controller with L2 ADAS software and sensors, and with Qualcomm on running infotainment and safety-critical ADAS workloads on a single architecture using Snapdragon Ride Elite and Ride Flex. Both partnerships pointed to the same conclusion: HARMAN wasn't chasing a more powerful cockpit ECU. It wanted Cross-Domain Central Compute that spans domains.
Ready Care, Ready Vision, and Ready Aware fit the same pattern — tying driver state, hazards around the vehicle, outside information, and the vehicle's own judgment together through the HMI. If ADAS is the technology that watches the road and decides what to do about it, HARMAN was trying to connect that judgment to what's happening inside the cabin and to the people in it.
If everything up to that point was validation through partnership, December 2025 turned it into ownership. HARMAN agreed to buy ZF's ADAS business for €1.5 billion — compute solutions, smart cameras, radar, and ADAS software, along with roughly 3,750 employees. The goal is to combine ZF's ADAS capability with HARMAN's Digital Cockpit into a centralized computing design that brings assisted and automated driving together with safety and user experience on one shared platform. What HARMAN bought isn't just a lineup of ADAS products. It's the ability to connect what the vehicle sees and decides with what people see and experience, on a single computing architecture.
Irawan's résumé looks different once it's set against that backdrop.
Irawan joined Bosch in 2006, moving through manufacturing planning and project management before becoming technical plant manager at Bosch Thailand and then heading quality management at the Chassis Systems Control division. From 2018, he ran the Driver Experience business inside Cross-Domain Computing Solutions, covering assisted, automated, and connected driving. The organization he led at the time — more than 1,000 software engineers — spanned everything from radar, camera, and ultrasonic sensors to ECUs, middleware, and application software across Level 0-4 autonomous driving and parking. Mercedes-Benz's Level 3 system in the S-Class is a flagship example. In 2022, he moved to ETAS as President and Chairman.
At ETAS, his job was to build the vehicle software foundation the SDV era needed. What sets Irawan apart is that he treated SDV not as a single product's problem but as an industry-wide collaboration problem. In June 2025, ETAS signed the VDA's memorandum of understanding to build an open-source software ecosystem and became a founding member of Eclipse S-CORE. Irawan himself first proposed the idea to the VDA. His long-standing conviction — that no company can handle the complexity of SDV without open collaboration across the industry — became a shared stack the whole industry now builds on.
That's why it's hard to see him as just another middleware executive.
The problem HARMAN has to solve going forward isn't a single technology. ZF's ADAS staff are joining HARMAN's existing Intelligent Cockpit, Connectivity, and Automotive Engineering Services organizations, and the company still has to keep working with semiconductor partners like Qualcomm and a wider set of software and sensor companies — all while serving global OEMs with different architectures and different demands.
What HARMAN needs to build isn't a closed system it makes entirely on its own, but a structure that lets all of these pieces run inside one Central Compute and SDV strategy. This is where Irawan's other experience matters. At ETAS, he built a position within an ecosystem that includes OEMs, Tier 1s, software companies, and the open-source community — and the years he spent moving through manufacturing, quality, ADAS, and Cross-Domain Computing inside Bosch are themselves an asset for running an organization the size HARMAN is becoming.
What HARMAN needs right now may not be a cockpit specialist or an ADAS specialist, but someone who can tie different technologies, organizations, and people into a single business.
Christian Sobottka, HARMAN's CEO, framed the appointment around one word: execution. The next generation of automotive innovation, he said, will be defined by execution — and he pointed to Irawan's strategic vision, operational track record, and software experience. The division of labor is clear. Sobottka continues to lead HARMAN Automotive's long-term strategy, its major transformation efforts, the ZF ADAS integration, and key customer and partner relationships. Irawan takes responsibility for day-to-day execution and business performance, with operational leadership of the Automotive business shifting to him in stages.
HARMAN has recently divested its non-core Digital Transformation Solutions business while stepping up investment in Automotive. The person it landed on at the end of that process is Thomas Irawan — someone who built ADAS and Cross-Domain Computing experience at Bosch, then built SDV software and an open-source ecosystem at ETAS.
The past two years were HARMAN's push beyond the cockpit. What comes after the ZF ADAS deal is different: integrating disparate technologies and organizations, turning cockpit and ADAS into a single Central Compute and SDV architecture, and making it a production business OEMs actually buy. From cockpit to central compute — on the trajectory HARMAN has drawn, Irawan's ability to execute is now the test.

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