VW Australia turns its own badge into a kangaroo deterrent — RooBadge

Kangaroos account for 90% of on-road wildlife accidents in Australia, and previous deterrents — plastic ultrasonic whistles and generic alarm speakers — did not work: the whistle's sound cannot be heard above the car, and the speakers' sounds mean nothing to a kangaroo. Volkswagen Australia set DDB Sydney the task of building one that does.

The agency's leap was to use the brand's most iconic surface: the roundel on the front grille. RooBadge is a 17cm circular disc that replaces the VW badge and projects a focused, high-frequency beam of sound from the front of the vehicle. Partnering with the University of Melbourne and WIRES, the team built sounds that mean something to a kangaroo — dingo calls, bird alarm calls, foot thumps — mixed with artificial tones in real time.

The app calibrates the beam with GPS and machine learning against species-distribution data, so the deterrent is tailored to the kangaroo species living where the car is, and to the vehicle's speed. A universal number-plate-mounted version extends the device to any car, and a WIRES reporting tool lets wildlife agencies log species-specific collisions.

The project ran three years of research and trials, received ethics approval to test on wild kangaroos, and by 2025 had won four Cannes Lions plus a Spikes Asia Silver — evidence that a hardware idea can support a brand platform even before collision-reduction statistics are published.