How HARMAN "Ready Aware" Brings Smarter Driving to Life with HERE Road Alerts

Real-time context becomes more important as we make driving safer & more intuitive. In this blog post, we explore how HARMAN Ready Aware helps drivers and automakers anticipate what’s ahead by turning real-world conditions into actionable, in-car insights making every drive smarter and more aware.

HARMAN Ready Aware

Ready Aware is a cloud-based, vehicle-to-network (V2N) SaaS solution that helps drivers make safer choices on the road through in-vehicle digital alerts about road, traffic, and weather conditions. Ready Aware addresses key challenges such as:

Unpredictable roads with a lack of look-ahead visibility
Imprecise road alert experiences with false-positive alerts
Excessive alerting leading to information overload
Ability to scale and offer digital experiences to new vehicles and ones on the road
Disparate data sources and software solutions increasing integration challenges and costs
Lack of OEM control over the user experience causing information overload
Hardware dependency for deployment increasing costs and extends deployment cycles

Ready Aware enables vehicle and manufacturers (OEMs) to offer new digital experiences to their customers that augment driver situational awareness. These experiences can be offered more profitably at a faster time-to-market by utilizing existing OEM cloud and connectivity investments.

High-level Architecture

Ready Aware is an end-to-end vehicle to network SaaS platform with pre-built in-vehicle client SDKs and cloud components that work together to process real-time data from vehicles and third-party data sources across regions to build a unified, contextual view of the driving environment. By combining these inputs, Ready Aware creates digital twins of vehicles and road events, enabling timely, accurate, and relevant in-vehicle alerts. This architecture allows OEMs to use their existing cloud and connectivity investments to deliver safer, more intelligent driving experiences with faster time-to-market.

Personalizing the Driver Experience

No two drivers or vehicles are the same. That’s why Ready Aware is built with a strong focus on complete configurability:

Alert triggers and conditions can be customized by hazard type
Alert behavior can be fine-tuned across different approach zones to the hazard
Alerts can be tailored based on driver and hazard context

This flexibility enables fine-tuning of the experience to provide contextual insights and strike the right balance between safety and ride comfort.

Ready Aware Use Cases

Ready Aware offers over 15 use cases that help improve a driver’s situational awareness and meet EU-NCAP 2026 requirements. The broad set of use cases include road hazards, traffic light, and V2N2V (Vehicle to Network to Vehicle) use cases such as Vehicle Hard Braking Ahead and Disabled Vehicles Ahead.

Below are a few examples of the use cases in action:

HERE integrations in Ready Aware

Ready Aware integrates with the HERE Road Alerts service through a cloud-to-cloud integration. Ready Aware also uses the Location library in the cloud to decode the OLR strings provided as part of the Road Alerts response.

HERE Road Alerts are accessed via the REST API in the . The API is polled every 15 seconds to match the road alerts' snapshot refresh rate, so that the latest data is available at any time. HARMAN is working towards a Kafka-based streaming interface that will reduce the latencies to much lower values.

One of the Ready Aware hazard alerts enabled by HERE is related to traffic congestion. While road congestion is very common and typically is not much of a hazard to the drivers, the HERE enabled alert provides unique insight on a specific type of congestion called “Dangerous end of queue jam”, condition where congestion is formed very quickly (e.g., through hard braking) and the end of the vehicle queue is backing up quite fast at an unexpected location beyond the line of sight (e.g., across a bend in a highway during non-peak hours). When combined with vehicle to vehicle (V2N2V) alerts that operate in low latency scenarios, such as vehicle hard braking ahead alerts, Harman and HERE bring a highly comprehensive intelligent and preventative mechanism to consumers that can help reduce collisions on the road.

Context Signals

Ready Aware uses vehicle context (speed, heading, acceleration, yaw rate, etc.), driver context and hazard context (distance, time to reach, applicable direction, etc.) to generate alerts that are contextual, reduce information overload and improve the safety and comfort of the driver.

Handling Edge Cases

There are several edge cases that impact the system performance and the user experience:

Location accuracy in the vehicle data, especially in dense urban canyons, is a challenge that can cause incorrect alerts to be generated or no alerts to be generated at all. HARMAN is working closely to improve connectivity and GNSS precision through their Ready Connect 5G TCU product with industry leading connectivity capabilities that Ready Aware integrates with.
Since the data for road hazards is in turn sourced from various other sources, the data quality and accuracy can vary by alert and by region. This can lead to false positives and impact the end user's trust in the system. Ready Aware includes a confidence engine feature that helps to reduce false positives through Machine Learning, only surfacing the most confident alerts to consumers.

Data Privacy & Security

Ready Aware is built with data privacy and security in consideration. All the vehicle data is anonymized and collected over secure channels (TLS) only in and around regions if interest and processed in memory and are ephemeral, unless for any debugging and ML training needs, this helps immensely in reducing data privacy and data security concerns. Several concepts from decades of V2X standards and industry experience are leveraged to avoid data privacy challenges.

What’s Next

As HARMAN continues to evolve the Ready Aware platform, one key takeaway stands out: simulation and data quality are critical for the success of connected vehicle solutions. Reliable, high-quality data is what turns awareness into action and shapes the user experience. Looking ahead, HARMAN plans to expand Ready Aware with new use cases powered by HERE location services and explore the applicability of several services like Destination Weather API, Weather Alerts, Predictive Road Weather, Fuel Prices API, Safety Camera API. With future-proof SaaS architecture, OEMs can integrate with HARMAN once, and continue to deliver smarter, safer, and more personalized driving experiences as the road ahead keeps evolving.