The Range Rover Sport SV Has Seats With Haptic Audio. But Are They Any Good?

At some point in your life, you may have experienced a movie in 4D. The images come at you in three dimensions, your chair shakes and lifts, and light snow or rain mists your face. Now, you can have something a lot like that in your car if you buy a 2024 Range Rover Sport SV Edition One.

The latest and greatest Range Rover offers 4D immersion with its Body and Soul seats (its cheeky acoustics-related acronym is BASS). Developed in tandem with a Canadian company called Subpac that specializes in “tactile audio systems,” the seats pulse in time with the music. It's a step above what you'll find in, say, a Bentley Bentayga with subwoofers in its seats.

Before I tried it myself, I wondered: is it just a party trick? Range Rover Vehicle Engineering Director Matt Becker explained to me why it’s not.

First of all, there's more to it than hard-hitting speakers pounding the beat into your brain. Land Rover integrated a series of transducers—devices that convert energy from one form to another into the back of the front seats—for an effect that pulses your body. The automaker says the seats enhance mental and physiological health by influencing heart rate variability, or the variation in time between each heartbeat. Even Harvard Medical School says people who have a high HRV may have greater cardiovascular fitness and resilience to stress, so Land Rover may be onto something here.

“Body and Soul seats adds a level of detail and dimension to the drive,” Becker says.

Becker tells me he was also curious if the BASS setup was just a gimmick. Then he drove one. The biggest difference, he says, is that on a longer drive, the pulses improve driver fatigue dramatically.