Sound of silence

Ford Focus EV

Ford (NYSE: F) has taken to the social media airwaves to find out how its soon-to-be-released Focus Electric should sound.

That's right, sound.

Responding to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) recent notice that requires an alert noise to be made by relatively quiet hybrid and electric vehicles driving at speeds under 15mph, Ford developed four different sounds and asked its "fans" of its Ford Electric Vehicles Facebook page to pick the one they prefer: A, B, C or D. 

Nearly 3,400 Ford employees also chimed in with their opinion when the poll was recently featured on the company's intranet site.

The automaker is working with the Oracle Post-Production/Unity Studio to leverage its sound mixing expertise and state-of-the-art sound production capabilities to create, mix and optimize different audio elements for electric vehicle sound. Unfortunately for those wary of more noise pollution in America's strip mall parking lots, NHTSA requires the sounds to be in the part of the noise spectrum that people remain sensitive to their entire lives.

“This sound needs to be something that can be integrated into a person’s sound spectrum so they can immediately recognize the noise and associate it with an EV approaching the rest of their lives – just like we do with emergency vehicle sirens," said Dave McCreadie, Ford's noise/vibration supervisor for hybrid and electric vehicles. 

Somehow that translates to sounds reminiscent of the Starship Enterprise.

If nothing else, Ford's engagement of a social media crowdsourcing strategy shows a new side of Detroit emerging on the other side of a massive taxpayer bailout.

“We’ve given customers a chance to have a voice and we’ve gone the extra step of acknowledging their input and building it into our business process,” said Scott Monty, Ford's digital and multimedia communications manager. 

At Sustainable Industries, we're going with with space-age sounding D. Or anything but the horrific grating sound that passes as B.