Poor dogs. All they want to do is enjoy the New Year’s Eve celebrations, yet humans have this annoying habit of continually firing loud rockets into the sky. At least they might have a bit of respite soon thanks to a new prototype kennel designed by Ford, which combines noise-canceling technology, sound-dampening cork, and an automatic door to give our canine friends a quiet retreat from the festivities.
The kennel, which is the first of a series of initiatives that Ford is calling “Interventions,” is really a sly promotion for the company’s noise-canceling technology that’s built into its latest Edge SUVs. In the car, microphones are used to pick up engine and transmission noises, and speakers then play the opposite frequencies to cancel them out.
Dogs can hear a much wider range of sound frequencies that humans can, and they can do so from four times farther away. That makes the unnatural noise from fireworks especially loud to them, and much more stressful as a result. This means that making noise-canceling technology work for dogs is a much bigger challenge than for humans. Humans are generally thought of as being able to hear frequencies between 20Hz and 20,000Hz, while dogs can hear much higher frequencies in the general range of 67Hz to 45,000Hz.
Ford hasn’t announced pricing or availability for the hi-tech kennel, which remains a promotional prototype for the time being. Last year, Ford announced another prototype product — a baby crib that simulates the gentle rocking of a car — which never made it to market. Now that it’s succeeded in promoting Ford’s SUV, we’d imagine a similar fate is about to befall this kennel.
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