How Honda screwed up an expensive project with a simple math error (2008)

5 days ago

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Honda engineers made a musical road in Lancaster, CA, designed to play the William Tell Overture when driven over at a constant speed.
The road's grooves were incorrectly spaced, leading to the melody being out of tune and the notes being wrong.
The error stemmed from miscalculating the spacing between grooves, affecting the vibration frequency and thus the pitch of the notes.
Honda attempted to cover up the mistake by editing the sound in their commercial, particularly the ending notes, to make them sound correct.
The project highlights a basic misunderstanding in the physics of sound production from road grooves, where both groove width and spacing affect the pitch.
Despite the error, the road became a topic of interest, featured in media and even rebuilt without fixing the original tuning issues.

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