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Hi Ho Civic! Honda’s Musical Road is Tonto
From the Autopia “Most Annoying Promotion Ever” department comes a dispatch from Lancaster, California. Honda’s guerilla marketers joined up with the Lancaster highway department and cut grooves into the pavement of a remote stretch of Avenue K. Far from ordinary rumble strips, this particular pavement modification caused a car’s tires to resonate in a way that sounded like the William Tell Overture (yes, that’s the theme to “The Lone Ranger”). Honda claimed the music sounded best when “played” on a new Civic driving exactly 55 miles per hour.
Lancaster residents disagreed, which is why we’re writing about it in the past tense. By the time you read this the “musical road” will have been paved over, leaving only a YouTube video after the jump to remember it by.
For all the poorly chosen music we hear blasting from elaborate in-car sound systems these days, it’s easy to see how Honda’s groovin’ pavement seemed like a good idea at the time. Let the road dictate the tunes, and let the car play them. Word has it that the Bee Gees were inspired to adopt the disco sound after enjoying the “beat” of driving over a wooden bridge crossing Biscayne Bay, which eventually became the rhythm guitar in “Jive Talkin’”.
We imagine the dusty brown landscape of Lancaster’s outmost reaches conjures up images of a certain Wild West hero. Just, not in the middle of the night, or so loudly. Now the only masked men Lancaster residents want to thank are the fine folks of the paving crews restoring Avenue K to its former tone-deaf status. “When you hear it late at night, it will wake you up from a sound sleep. It’s awakened my wife three or four times a night,” Lancaster resident Brian Robin told the Los Angeles Daily News. “We thought it was far enough away,” Antelope Valley Film Office liason Pauline East told the Daily News. Who knew that the sort of folks who move to remote areas don’t like to be bothered by strange noises, not to mention city-dwellin’ tourists crowding their streets with Honda Civics? Honda officials apologized to all who complained, including some who lived as far away as a half mile from the musical road and still heard it. Still, we imagine that Lancaster residents wouldn’t complain about Honda’s previous So Cal guerilla marketing campaign, which had Honda employees pumping free gas and carrying groceries.
Photo courtesy Flickr user jillnjer
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