As if things weren’t bad enough for the legendary Ford Mustang, the EcoBoost 2015 model sends engine sounds through the vehicle’s speakers!
It’s all due to the decline in the muscle cars muscle. Once the envy of car enthusiasts worldwide, often featured in films driven by Hollywood heroes, the muscle cars of yesteryear with their hood lifting V8 engines no longer come off the assembly lines due to new emission standards and other ecological adaptations and adjustments. It’s now a four cylinder, high performance world where cars have more speed due to being composed of lighter materials.
The problem here is that these four cylinder, ecologically friendly, high performance engines just don’t kick out that primal, jungle roar of their predecessors. It was that engine roar that made people turn their heads on the streets, caused deer to flee, cows to stampede and dogs to run under the porch for protection. In the good old days, when a muscle car came down the road you heard it before you saw it. Nowadays however that celebrated roar had to be fabricated and pumped in. This is achieved by something called by Ford as Active Noise Control. This system is designed to mask out unwanted noises but deliver the authentic noise that the classic versions of these cars are legend for.
Sounding a bit like doublespeak, chief engineer of the Ford Mustang line, Dave Perciak explained what Active Noise Control does. Perciak states that the system delivers the sound from the engine through the speakers after processing the sound by also amplifying “the existing engine sound order,”.
So far only the EcoBoost model of the Mustang has this system and the competition is waiting to see what happens next. If the public takes to the system then it’s a good bet it or something similar will appear in lots of models. It would be hilarious knowing the ingenuity of the public when customizers of muscle cars take the speakers and put them outside the cars to get that sound blasting toward the public, making that historic roaring noise of the classic muscle cars wafting over the landscape and scaring both man and animal alike.
Muscle car fans are picky. They don’t like pretense. They love the history, performance, looks and power of the greats but creating a sound system to amplify the engine’s sound might not cut it. Maybe it will but only time will tell.
