The Best Automotive Tech at CES 2026

We already dubbed the Sony-Honda EV collab’s massive front screen the best dashboard at the show, but it bears repeating. Front dashboards are the way we all interact with our cars, and the Afeela 1 understood the assignment. The massive panoramic screen that extends until the passenger door is made up of two displays, one 12.3 inches and the other 28.5 inches. With Sony behind the connected car tech, it’s not surprising that the sweeping screen is made for gaming (and wireless PlayStation Remote Play) and media viewing, complete with themes based on popular Sony games like em>Astro Bot. Honda will get its moment when the Afeela 1 is actually drivable. The EV is supposed to arrive in California by the end of the year for just over $100,000 to start.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Digital Chassis car won’t ever be a production vehicle, but that’s not the point. The showcase car was built for CES to bring to life the infotainment, AI assistant, and automated driving and safety features that simultaneously run behind the scenes of a car. The concept car, equipped with 13 cameras and 20 speakers, was able to provide driver assistance for a passed-out driver and call safety operators when the driver didn’t respond. It proactively took a photo of the cabin to describe the scene to a human operator and checked the driver’s smartwatch to monitor for vitals. While an impressive example of what an AI agent could one day do in the car, more realistic was the concept car’s ability to navigate to the first meeting on the driver’s calendar and select a restaurant for dinner.

Waymo’s driverless robotaxi fleet has become synonymous with the Jaguar I-Pace EVs it uses in cities around the country. But at CES 2026, the autonomous vehicle company showed its newest vehicle: the Ojai. That’s the name Waymo has given the Zeekr electric minivans made by Chinese company Geely Auto that are now decked out in a new Waymo hue. Many of the 13 cameras, six radar, and four LiDAR sensors will sit atop the new Waymo Ojai, similar to the I-Pace design, so there’s no mistaking this for anything but an autonomous vehicle. The new Waymos are expected to make it to San Francisco later this year.

Speaking of robotaxis, Uber is back in the game with a big collab. The company is powering a fleet of Lucid Gravity EVs filled with Level 4 self-driving capability from Nuro and Nvidia compute power. The driverless taxis were unveiled at CES 2026 as prototypes that will be deployed in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year, pending certification.

The taxis take advantage of the Lucid Gravity’s three-row SUV, large cargo hold, and built-in backseat screens that control things like heated seats and air conditioning—important for a driverless cab ride. Without destroying the sleek look of the electric SUV, the repurposed version looks like an autonomous vehicle with high-res cameras, LiDAR sensors, and radar riding on the roof and throughout the car. Eventually, Uber plans to operate the robotaxis everywhere it has a presence around the globe.

Agentic AI is a big deal for cars, where voice control makes the driving experience more interactive than ever before. Geely Auto, the Chinese carmaker that owns Volvo, announced at CES 2026 that it selected Cerence AI’s agentic AI platform for cars, called xUI. In a demo showing the voice-controlled agent at work, it was immediately clear how smoothly (and naturally) the Cerence system connected navigation, climate, car controls, media, and even productivity tools through a Microsoft 365 integration. On the fly, drivers can set up “voice shortcuts†to control a set of functions, for example, using a phrase to open all the windows. While only a demo, the system didn’t falter when things went off script, and the driver could speak casually and colloquially without a hiccup. Cerence AI has long shown how to use voice control in the car, so I wasn’t surprised that its latest version can impressively handle complex situations like multiple tasks from different seats in the car.

This is what CES is all about: proof of concepts that are absolutely unnecessary, but make you rethink the car passenger experience. I couldn’t stop thinking about Garmin’s new use of Meta’s Neural Band in the car. Wearing the wrist band, you can use your thumb, and index and middle fingers to control a touchscreen—without touching the screen. The band reads electric signals from your wrist and converts the midair gestures into swipes and clicks onscreen. The Neural Band is by no means an essential tool, but it brings up a new way for passengers (and maybe even drivers once the car is parked, charging, or in a not-so-future fully autonomous mode) to interact with the car’s infotainment features.