India is a rapidly developing economy with an ever increasing number of automobiles on poorly planned roads. As a direct result of this, millions of pedestrians are facing increasingly dangerous situations while crossing roads all thanks to the new trend of wearing headphones and listening to musical devices is emerging in urban India.

So, Hyundai Motor India Foundation, a public service arm of Hyundai Motor India, decided to tackle this growing menace head on.

The current horn technology in all cars works at a basic auditory level averaging around 93 decibels. This sound is easily drowned out if someone is wearing headphones listening to music or talking on the phone. So much so that, in India over 12,000 pedestrians lose their lives this way every year *.

Urban cities in India have millions of pedestrians and as many cheap Mp3 players and phones and together they have enabled these dangerous habits.

*Accidental Deaths and Suicides Report - National Crime Records Bureau Report 2011

Our idea was to couple a normal car horn with a high frequency emitter that can disturb the music of oblivious pedestrians causing them to look around and be wary of oncoming traffic.

The engineering team consisted of Arjun Gaur of Talkabout Solutions and his entire team of specialist engineers. So far, high frequency emitters have never been used in the automotive sector. So this idea takes an existing technology of sound generators and speakers and makes it work to save precious lives.

There are two section in the circuit A and B section of the emitter, A produces a variable voltage and section B produces a frequency based on the voltage created by the first section and thus a variable frequency is generated which is amplified and fed to the drivers to create sound.

This idea takes advertising to a grassroots level for all Hyundai car owners and potential buyers, as it takes care of safety for not just car drivers who are antagonized for driving incorrectly, when it is often the fault of the pedestrian, but also each and every citizen of this country.Currently, Hyundai is in the process of obtaining the intellectual property rights for this idea hence, we cannot share the exact technology behind the idea, short of informing that this emitter is based on a sound generator and speaker platform that has already existed but never been used in this manner for any car before.

Hyundai, provided the seed money to this project and is also in the process of digitizing this technology so that it can be made into a microprocessor to be coupled with an average car horn and put as a standard fitment across their range of cars, not just in India but also globally.

Tested on the urban roads of New Delhi/ National Capital Region in India as a pilot project for three months, we instantly saw a decline in people crossing the road without looking due to their music or headphones being disturbed. As the high pitched emission is under the legally required decibel range and poses no threat to pedestrians or drivers, this project got the target audience’s attention with a whopping 16 per cent drop in accidents across tested areas in New Delhi at almost zero cost to the carmaker.

Over 50 cars had been fitted with the early alpha and beta phase emitters while Hyundai has taken this technology under further internal testing and plan to roll it out as standard fitment in all their cars as early as 2016.