KITTING up a car for rural living often means installing a roo bar and bright spotlights, but what about a Roo Badge?
If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because a Roo Badge is a new gadget manufactured by Volkswagen and designed to scare away kangaroos by using an embedded, directional loudspeaker.
It’s a neat piece of kit that the VW engineers spent three years perfecting alongside kangaroo behaviour specialists.
The badge on the car grill contains a speaker that is powerful enough to project noise at a volume louder than a car moving at 100km/h and at such a high frequency that humans can’t hear it.
The sound is powered by an app built into the car’s infotainment system.
Activation is automatic and the app uses vehicle speed and vehicle GPS co-ordinates, plus the co-ordinates of known animal populations, to cue the speaker noises when appropriate.
Having gained approval from the University of Melbourne’s Office of Research Ethics and Integrity for stage four trials, the Volkswagen team will begin real-world testing using an Amarok at speed among wild populations.
The Roo Badge is a custom-fit replacement for an Amarok badge, but the backers see this as a tool to aid car owners and animals around the world, especially countries with big deer populations.
Using kangaroo population data, the plan will be to create custom noises for each species of kangaroo, leaving the app to decide which sounds are the best to play.
There’s also a reporting tool so organisations like Wires can update population locations and varieties.
Assuming the fourth stage of the trials proceeds well, VW is working on a licence-plate-sized Roo Badge that could fit on any vehicle from any manufacturer.
VW used data that showed 90 percent of wildlife collisions in Australia involved the kangaroo.
Time will tell whether a Roo Badge becomes a part of the Aussie vernacular like the Roo Bar has.
