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Hi Ho Honda! Civic Musical Road Plays Lone Ranger Theme Song

From Autopia's "Most Annoying Promotion Ever" department comes this dispatch from Lancaster, California, where Honda's marketing team joined forces with the city to turn a stretch of road on the edge of town into a giant LP that plays "The William Tell Overture," which you might more readily recognize as the theme to The Lone Ranger. The quarter-mile stretch of Avenue K renamed "Civic Musical Road" features grooves cut into the pavement in such a way as to make the tires resonate to the tune of Gioachino Rossini's classic symphony. The road, which Honda claimed sounded best when "played" on a new Civic going exactly 55 miles per hour, was just one of four "melody roads" in the world and the first in America. "I think it's kind of cool," Peggy Llano told the L.A. Daily News. "When you are driving out on Avenue K. you're going out to the middle of nowhere. It's kind of a nice surprise to come across this thing." A lot of Lancaster residents disagreed, which is why we're writing about this in the past tense. The "musical road" is being paved over today, leaving only the 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 outermost reaches conjures up images of a certain Wild West hero. Just not in the middle of the night, or quite 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 Daily News. Honda's ad agency, which plans to include the musical road in an ad that will air later this month, chose Lancaster based on its feeling of openness and community. The city signed on because it wants to bring more film and TV production in the area, and road crews started cutting the grooves Sept. 5. "We thought it was far enough away," Antelope Valley Film Office liaison 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 -- some of them reportedly making multiple trips to play the tune over and over again like a skipping record. Honda officials apologized to all who complained, including some who lived as far as a half mile from Civic Musical Road and still heard it. Still, we imagine that Lancaster residents wouldn't complain about Honda's previous So Cal guerrilla marketing campaign, which had Honda employees pumping free gas and carrying groceries. Maybe the problem was the tune Honda picked. One Lancaster resident suggested that old Beatles chestnut "Yesterday." Perhaps "Drive My Car" would have been a better choice. Let us know what tune you'd like to hear your car play. Photo courtesy Flickr user jillnjer. Video of Civic Musical Road: Video of a musical road in Japan: Let us know what tune you'd like to hear your car play as you drive down a desolate stretch of road, and be sure to vote for your favorite. Show tunes that are: hot | new | top-rated or submit your own prediction   Submit a tune While you can submit as many tunes as you want, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed. Back to top