Click coming from your car should be music to your ears
Feb 12, 2017, 9:56 AM | Updated: 10:20 am
Your car isn’t just built to get you from place to place. It’s also designed … to sing to you.
Listen carefully. What does this sound like to you?
A click?
It may sound like a click, and actually, it IS a click. But it is a click that has been carefully tuned by a specialist known as a Vehicle Harmony engineer.
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CBS’s Chris Van Cleave got an audio tour of a Lincoln with Ford Motor Company Harmony engineer Sean DeGennaro.
“A decade ago, cars only needed a handful of noises, like a turn signal,” DeGennaro said. “But as vehicles get smarter, the beeps, ticks, and tocks number in the dozens and include new warnings.”
Ford isn’t the only car maker in the business of vehicular auto-tuning. Infiniti tunes its door slam.
GMC can take up to a year to perfect a warning chime. Which, as Van Cleave noted, is a long time to spend on a ding.
“It is! It is! But it’s going to be there forever,” DeGennaro said. “We want to make sure that it’s a positive experience and that you’re not walking away going, ‘Ugh! I could never buy a Lincoln product again because they screwed up that chime and it was so irritating.’”
You can bet the last thing Ford wants to do … is irritate Matthew McConaughey.
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