Hybrid Cars Noisier

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —A year ago, physician Everett Meyer and electrical engineer Bryan Bai were soaking up knowledge about creating and running a business while attending the Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

What began as a team project they proposed during the 2007 Institute has turned into Enhanced Vehicle Acoustics, a San Francisco Bay Area-based business that has developed technology to transform nearly soundless hybrid cars into vehicles that pedestrians can hear.

Meyer, who holds an MD and PhD in immunology from Stanford, told 2008 institute participants on July 10 about the challenges he sees for his new firm. Enhanced Vehicle Acoustics also involves Bai and a third key player, Brook Reeder, another ’07 Institute participant who holds a master’s degree from the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

“The spirit of this course is learning by trial and error and then pushing forward,” said Meyer. “We’ve had a lot of good advice.”

The four-week business management program is designed for graduate students from non-business fields who have dreamed up a good idea for a company. There are 72 people attending the 2008 Institute, 66 of them from Stanford.

The sound system Meyer and his team developed for super-quiet cars, including the Toyota Prius, uses miniature, all-weather audio speakers installed in the car’s wheel wells that are activated when the vehicle shifts into silent mode. The system cuts off when the car’s gasoline engine is running or when the vehicle’s speed reaches about 25 mph when tire and wind noise typically make it detectable.

Speakers hooked into the car’s computer broadcast sound based on what the car is doing. If the motorist is driving forward, for example, the sounds are only projected in the forward direction. Should a driver cut the steering wheel to the left, the sound will project only from the left side.

In a world used to hearing vehicles approaching, hybrids pose problems. Having auditory alerts on now-quiet cars could make it safer for pedestrians as more hybrids hit the road, Meyer said.

If the company receives funding to move ahead, the partners say they will target the sizeable market of the nation’s existing hybrid cars, which Meyer estimated to be about a half-million vehicles. But, he added, getting carmakers to include the device on their new models is the company’s long-term goal.

Right now, Enhanced Vehicle Acoustics has a six-member team of full- and part-time workers, including the two cofounders. The system was created with the help of a grant from the National Federation of the Blind advocacy group, which was concerned that the cars, which can emit as little sound as a golf cart when utilizing electric power, could pose a danger to the nation’s 1.3 million people who are legally blind.

While it would have helped him to have a background in acoustics, Meyer said, “having an MD actually carries a lot of weight. If you say something is dangerous, people take you seriously.”