Drive out to the Australian outback, and you’ll get the same advice across the country. “Watch out for the ‘roos when the sun goes down!” they’ll say. It’s all too easy to get surprised when Skippy bounds in front of your car at the last second, and tragedy strikes. Amazingly, Volkswagen hasn’t just heard of this problem. It’s actually doing something about it.
The result of Volkswagen’s efforts is the RooBadge. The idea is to replace a standard metal VW badge with an advanced “audio shield” that warns wildlife away from approaching vehicles.
Given the size of the problem, Volkswagen is right to do something about it. Tens of thousands of kangaroos are hit by Aussie drivers every year; they make up 90% of wildlife collisions Down Under. The results can be catastrophic, often killing the animal. Cars don’t fare too well either; I myself have seen friends lose vehicles to ‘roo strikes, and it can be pretty traumatic in the moment, too. A solution that actually works would be great, and it appears Volkswagen may have one per the video below. Viewer discretion is advised:
RooBadge consists of a perforated Volkswagen badge with several sound emitters hidden behind it. These emitters play sounds designed to warn away wildlife. Volkswagen has also proposed a rectangular version that can mount to a license plate so non-Volkswagen vehicles can keep kangaroos at bay as well.
As part of the development effort, Volkswagen has been researching the distribution of kangaroo species across the country. The goal is to create a broad spectrum of audio warnings that work to warn away all different types of kangaroos across the country.
The initial phase has focused on warning away Eastern Grey kangaroos, with future testing hoping to adapt sounds to suit the Western Grey Kangaroo and Red Kangaroo. In the long term, the idea is that the RooBadge will vary its sound based on GPS data to best target kangaroos in the immediate area. Volkswagen notes it could be altered to work with deer in European and North American markets with further research.
Early testing was done on golf courses using domesticated kangaroos. The research team determined that certain natural and synthetic high-frequency sounds were effective at “alarming and dispersing kangaroos.” Think angry bird sounds and dingo calls. Field testing was then used to develop directional speaker elements that could project these sounds at a significant distance from a vehicle traveling at 62 mph (100 km/h). 
Real-world testing followed, with Volkswagen’s researchers seeing positive results. Data was captured with stationary VW Amaroks using motion sensors to activate the speakers when a kangaroo passed by. 360-degree cameras captured the kangaroo’s responses. With kangaroos successfully cleared away in tests, Volkswagen has now stepped up to testing with slow-moving vehicles after receiving ethics approval to do so.
It might sound like an early April Fool’s joke, but it appears Volkswagen is quite sincere about its efforts. Yes, it’s clearly a way to market the Amarok pickup to the Australian market, but it’s also an idea with real value. The automaker is developing the hardware in concert with the University of Melbourne and wildlife rescue organization WIRES.
The automaker claims it’s on a journey to create the first scientifically proven vehicular kangaroo deterrent, and that wording is key. All kinds of sonic-repellent devices have been sold over the years to solve this problem. The vast majority claim to generate high-frequency sound via the air passing over the vehicle at speed, but powered types exist too. The ShuRoo is one of the more well-known products, but one scientific study failed to find it had any real effect on reducing roo strikes.
It’s also worth noting that human influences play a role in the problem, too. Water runoff from roads tends to green up foilage on the roadside, attracting kangaroos to these areas. Combined with human settlements increasingly encroaching on traditional habitats, you can see how poor Skip is having a rough time of it.
Volkswagen isn’t selling the RooBadge just yet, as it’s still a research project at this stage. However, it does appear to be doing all the necessary work to create a device that actually works for warning wildlife off the roads. Here’s hoping it actually hits the market one day to save our cars, and more importantly, our hoppy friends down under. Go get ’em, Skip!
Image credits: Volkswagen, Shuroo, Motoquipe
What my brain imagines this to sound like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPIoEbbMGLw&t=65s
If the VW roo deterrent also works on deer, they need to start selling that feature in the U.S. STAT and advertise it like crazy. They’d probably gain lots of new customers.
Nice! Torch also needs something that works for deer!
Also can we get one that repels people away from newer VW’s so they don’t get stuck with high mechanic bills?
I still liked when I had my 84 Jetta though- it was fun to drive and the 1st car I learned to drive stick
Now I want another Rabbit GTI like I used to have and/or a CRX
Had two big deer wandering around the backyard on Monday afternoon.
At university the EE students society had a project going in which we designed and built a programmable microprocessor driven bird repellent system. It worked very well until the greenies branded it as cruel to the bloody pigeons and canada geese the clients used the system to keep away from their properties.
“Make driving in Australia safer” – Let’s review the law and logistics here. How is VW going to ban all alcohol consumption in Australia?
I mean when we visited Cairns they were pulling every car on the Captain Cook Highway over and breathalyzing them…that’s far more than they do for that here in Arizona where it seems like drunk driving may actually be encouraged as long as you don’t hit anything (for legal reasons, this is a joke).
I want this to be real but it does slightly have the feeling of a press release accidentally issued three days too early…
I honestly thought the same until I saw the university connection and looked into the background of the researchers. If it’s a piss take they’ve absolutely got us licked.
Hope it works better than the ultrasonic mouse deterrents. Which is to say that it works in any way shape or form because those don’t.
Haha, for sure. I think the fact they’re focusing on specific sounds rather than just random high frequency whine makes a difference.
This should be electric, with a recording or a sound generator and a speaker. The sound will be different at 40 MPH, 60 MPH and 80 MPH. At lower speeds there would be no sound, or a quiet, ineffective sound.
There is also the eventuality of the animals getting accustomed to the noise and just ignoring it.
North American market needs a Pao size one before Jason has another “oh deer” moment
The South Australian Ambulance Service fitted ShuRoos to their fleet for a short while. They don’t anymore – I think that speaks to the effectiveness of that device. Now they just fit them with plastic “Smart Bar” bull bars in the hope they’ll bounce off…
This is going to be fun for people with houses situated close to rural roads. You’re snoozing peacefully with your windows open for the cool night breeze when you are awakened by a mix of angry bird calls, dingos barking, and ‘synthetic sounds’ dopplering toward then away from you.
I wonder if they will try to combine it with infrared sensors & ai so it doesn’t just constantly emit the noise
Like a rowdy zoo on a trailer flying past you at 120 km/h
That’s the impression I got from the article. It seems like they have some way of only deploying the sound when it would be useful. Not that hard to do, in this day and age
Not that hard to do, but one of the first non-entertainment, non-profit uses of AI /data collection I’ve seen.
That would be great if those efforts are successful and can also translate to deer and moose, etc (translation isn’t always easy or even a given; apropos of that, George Bernard Shaw commented that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” This endeavor [endeavour!] is in Australia, after all.) It’d be a real win-win for everyone involved, that is, animals, people, and Paos.
Presumably VW would have some means of verifying from the driver’s seat whether the RooBadge is functioning properly, especially if some of the sounds are outside of the normal human hearing spectrum? Also especially since such devices, being on the front, would be exposed to the elements (such as wind, rain, sleet, hail, & snow), sabotage (!!), minor collisions like from inept parallel parking maneuvers, etc, etc…
Also, how would it affect animals such as cats and dogs riding in the car? Trips to the veterinarian are already fraught with stress for many animals. Just yesterday I took one of my cats to the vet for his annual shots; of all my cats he’s the most stressed by car rides despite being a big old tomcat. On the way he pooped, threw up, and peed in the cat carrier even though he’d been sedated with gabapentin; I had to stop each time and clean up the poor baby. So I wonder about an option for turning off the RooBadge if it does indeed affect passengers.
Very good points. Once the devices get clogged up with dead insect goop they will probably not work as designed, or at all. Can you imagine how much work it would be to thoroughly clean them once a month or so?
I am old enough to remember when all kinds of people had those little “noise” makers stuck on their front bumpers for deer. I always assumed they did not do much.
I’ve only visited Australia (Sydney area) once back in Y2K or so. Great trip. One of the first things I noticed when I arrived was the number of cars (and utes!) that had brush guards (cow catchers, bull bars, what have you) on them. So I asked my host about it. He replied, “you see, kangaroos are very stupid animals.” That was all I needed to hear.
I had a chuckle when a comment on the Jac T9 article said they would prefer the Mahindra without the ‘brush guards’ around the headlights – mate, that stock bullbar is barely adequate here in Western NSW.
There’s a reason you see big aftermarket bullbars (known as ‘Five-Posters’) on Landcruisers and the like when you head into the Outback.
The factory bullbars offer some protection from smaller Eastern Grey Kangaroos, but the Big Reds or a big Grey male roo will fold them into your bonnet and smash your headlights in one go.
Sounds like hitting a moose. Might as well be a brick wall. The only defense is not to hit it!
Deer seem to hate the dual tone Fiamm horns I have on my cars. Not sure what it is about them. Anecdotally they’ve scared off a deer per year since installing them.
I think my old housemate used to play keyboard for Deer Per Year.
Skippy! Skippy!
Skippy the smushed kangaroo
Skippy! Skippy!
Skippy the smushed kangaroo
Skippy! Skippy!
Skippy, the road kill ‘roo
Skippy! Skippy!
VW’s gonna save you
Surely Torch has enough random gadgets to build something similar for his Pao (aka deer magnet).
Or a modified cow catcher (cervus catcher?)
He just needs to reverse the Pao particle polarity
The say that in Australia. We say “watch fer deer” in the Midwest. The rest of the world just says, “drive safe, I love you.” I think this is strong evidence Australia is the Midwest of Commonwealth Nations.
East coast too, more than you might think!
On weekends, I’ll often ride my motorcycle way out of the city to reach the fun backroad twisties; I do my best to do my spirited riding well before dusk, and then definitely on the ride home, shift more of my focus to the sides of the roads. I find it esp. unnerving when I spook them and I can see them running parallel to me; I’m just waiting for them to suddenly cut 90 degrees.
I used to live in the Blue Ridge foothills near the Skyline Drive and the Appalachian Trail. I frequently rode my bicycle late at night (fewer cars) on rural roads and highways. One night as I blasted down a two lane state highway, a deer raced out of trees, ran parallel to me then cut straight across my path. It nearly cleared me, but I struck its hindquarters. The deer was spun around and I rode right through the impact, no fall, no injury. All I can figure is that’s its back legs were airborne when we collided allowing it to pivot like gate and reducing the force of the hit. The deer sped off seeming no worse for wear. Me, too.
And in northern New England, it’s both deer and moose. Moose are particularly bad because they’re tall and if there’s oncoming traffic and a driver is using only low-beam headlights, all that’s immediately visible is the legs of the (rather tall) moose — so in many moose strikes, the car drives under the moose, which brings the animal crashing down on the hood and windshield of the car.
The roads in upstate New York are basically painted red with deer blood
Same with western PA. The areas surrounding Pittsburgh are absolutely infested with deer.
Confirmed. My coworkers wife has hit, no joke, 13 deer. 13! He’s hit a few himself. The deer here are endless.
There was a year where my VL Commodore was a roo magnet for some reason.
I hit at more than a half-dozen of the buggers, at all hours of the day.
Luckily they kept breaking a headlight and maybe the front bumper and nothing else, except the wallaby that hit the rear plastic hubcap head-first!
You could get Taiwan-made headlights for about $100 Aussie and a front bumper from the same source for about $120.
I kept a set of each in storage, ready to replace the busted parts after another strike and then re-order in preparation for the next time.
The deer are everywhere. I’ve smacked two in my driving career, and had countless near-hits.
A couple of weeks ago I saw 8 of them cross a road. As I passed them, I saw 7 more about to do the same thing.
Deer are everywhere. The Midwest is unique in our unwillingness to directly express emotionally attachment – electing to use deer-based warnings as a substitute.
Not just Midwest. I’ve hit 2, one in Utah and one in Virginia.
Deer are everywhere. But there’s a unique quality to Midwestern emotional repression.
Oh ok I see what you meant. Deer still suck. Damn overgrown rodents
I’ve seen them on the freeway on-ramp ¾ of a mile from my parents’ suburban edge neighborhood (unbroken woods behind them down past the state line and west to the next conurbation), and in an exurban-ish part of a suburban county not too far away – the first couple looked cute, but the next few miles revealed dozens along the shoulder, bringing to mind the word “infestation”. Most of my driving is urban, so I’ve never hit one, but I’ve seen the aftermath next to that on-ramp and heard of fatalities near there in an area that’s part of a large commutershed.
But they are quite tasty though
Same applies with roos, nice and lean red meat quite like venison.
I ran out of time to make DT my famous roo tacos when he was here.
“Mind how you go!”
Will be interested to see if this works on deer, also, I’ve hit three of those suicidal morons over the years and had probably a dozen or more close calls. Also had someone else hit one in front of my house, came home from vacation with buzzards going at it in the side yard
So far, everything that’s been sold has been Fuel Shark-style snake oil, those sonic animal guards are identical to the stick-on plastic deer whistles that were popular between the 1970s and 90s, seemed like every car that smacked a deer back then had one of those on the grille
Even into the early 2000s, those deer whistles were common Autozone junk purchases. I asked my dad if they worked. He wisely told me, “if they did, the insurance company would require them.” Of course, he also found out the hard way by clobbering many a deer while having the deer whistles glued to his front bumper.
You just need MORE deer whistles. Load up with like 50 of them across the bumper!
Why stop there? Try the Mad Max Doof Wagon, but with deer whistles only.
Those whistles are useless. They claim to be ultrasonic, like a dog whistle. Problem is deer don’t have ultrasonic hearing like dogs.
“Say they’re ultrasonic, then when they don’t work we can tell suckers that they work just fine but out of the range of human hearing! Yeah, that’s the ticket!”
A guy on my street has 2 of the deer whistles on the roof of his 17 Corolla.
Hilariously I had this conversation with a family member. In Australia.
“What happened to your old VK Commodore?”
“Oh, I totalled it. I hit a deer.”
“You hit a deer?”
“Yeah.”
“Where the hell did you hit a deer?”
“At a deer farm.”
If a deer exists in the same general area as a car, it’s going to find a way to dart in front of it
Kinda like all the bang – a – Bambi we have in several parts of the US. Like Torch, I’ve had a several cars that were deer magnets.
Like the deer whizzer whistles you mention, color me skeptical on their efficacy. They will probably just allow the ‘roos to home in on the exact center of the vehicle.
Ah! So clearly the solution is to mount a sacrificial Pao to my front bumper so that the deer hit that instead of my car! I’m a genius!
Will it retrofit on my VW Rootan?
I see what you did there.
Should also work on VW Roobbit. Mate.
We all know the VW Rootan is really just a Dodge Kangavan.
Don’t bother! It’s roobbish anyway. (The badge, of course. Not your Rootan.)