Have you ever been bothered by kangaroos crossing the road that do not obey the traffic rules? Then Volkswagen might have the solution for you. There is a special badge in the grille of this Volkswagen Amarok. The Volkswagen logo is a speaker intended to deter wandering kangaroos and thus reduce the risk of accidents. It sounds like an early April Fool's joke, but this topic is a bit too serious for that.
Before you think that you can't do anything with this because you don't have a Volkswagen: this technology can be used on any car. According to VW, there will also be a version that you can mount under your license plate that contains the same technology as the logo. In Australia they came up with this idea because a lot of kangaroos are hit there, as VW shows in the video below. The special logo is therefore appropriately named RooBadge.
How the Volkswagen logo with speaker scares off a kangaroo
It sounds quite logical. Animals hear frequencies much higher than we humans do. Volkswagen is responding to this. Together with the University of Melbourne, the brand has conducted research into which sounds kangaroos do and do not hear. There are currently whistles that you can mount on your bumper, but according to the researchers, they do not work.
The solution, according to Volkswagen and the researchers, is to use sounds that kangaroos recognize. There are many different types of kangaroos, and this has also been considered. Based on GPS, the logo knows where you are driving and adapts its sounds to the environment. This way, all kangaroos should know not to go near the sound in question.
For example, one of the recognizable sounds for a kangaroo is stamping on the ground. How you make something like that stand out above the sound of the wind and a 3.5-liter V6, we don't know either. It is not yet known when the RooBadge will come onto the market and what it will cost. The Volkswagen Australia website states that the technology is now in the testing phase. The brand wants to further develop the badge so that it also works on other animals, such as deer. That could also be useful on this side of the world.