We’ve seen frivolous additions on luxury cars, but with this one by Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is probably the best definition of optional extra. The company is giving its new Range Rover Sport SV EDITION ONE something called the Body and Soul Seat, aptly abbreviated as BASS, that’s made by tactile audio company SUBPAC. And the best way to describe this is probably a subwoofer seat.
To be fair, the seat does more than just pump out the lower extremes of a song’s frequency to the one sitting on it. It also delivers haptic feedback, letting you more literally feel the beat of your music. It also doubles as a sort of bone conduction speaker, sending the vibrations to your inner ear via your bones rather than the air. Worth mentioning is that this is not meant to replace the car’s audio system, but rather complement the 29-speaker 1,430W system of the Range Rover Sport SV EDITION ONE, which includes one subwoofer, according to Engadget.
So why add one more excessively sophisticated sound system to one that’s already plenty robust on its own? According to the press release by both JLR and SUBPAC, there are additional health benefits to letting you literally feel the music. The claim being that this can help with stress reduction by improving heart rate variability. Though these benefits are only conveyed to those sitting in the front seats, oddly enough.
In the large scheme of things, a subwoofer bone conduction speaker seat is not the most ridiculous thing to charge money for. Though it’s this sort of frivolousness that may well find its way to gaming chairs, which already draw inspiration entirely from performance car seats. It probably won’t be long before a gaming chair maker comes up with its own take on this tech, or partners with SUBPAC for it.
