How Ford Made the 2020 Mustang Shelby GT500 the Right Kind of Loud
A muscle car has to have the right exhaust note. Ford spent countless hours engineering the new GT500 to get the proper roar.
I’m sitting in the Shelby GT500 prototype with Tom Teknos, who leads the noise, vibration and harshness team for Ford Performance vehicles. The windows are down, the 5.2-liter V-8 rumbling softly in the background. He unlatches the door.
A loud drone fills the cabin.
He’s only moved the door a fraction of an inch, but there’s a distinct change in the sound level.
Cracking the door, Teknos explains, disables the Shelby’s active noise-cancellation system. What I’m hearing is the unpleasant hum that Ford’s painstakingly filtered out.
Using an array of microphones, the noise-cancellation system listens for specific unwanted tones and uses the Mustang’s stereo system to produce opposing sound waves to cancel out the drone. Much like a good pair of noise-canceling headphones, they can cut sound out without requiring more insulation from the outside world.
