Get your horntone on

a href=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ez6JTnOl_tQ/SYr53CM9OsI/AAAAAAAAAL8/iQTnC_35wVc/s1600-h/horntones.jpg”img id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5299322635434146498″ style=”FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 84px” alt=”” src=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ez6JTnOl_tQ/SYr53CM9OsI/AAAAAAAAAL8/iQTnC_35wVc/s200/horntones.jpg” border=”0″ //aThe folks at a href=”http://www.dimoramotorcar.com/”DiMora Motorcar/a, making a luxury car the company says is the “world’s first hand-built, $2 million, sixteen-cylinder production automobile,” are hyping the availability of an MP3-enabled horn from the a href=”http://www.horntones.com/”Horntones company/a. The system (pictured) allows users to customize their horn’s sound, naturally, in a manner similar to that currently torturing the ears of crowded public areas with snippets of so many annoying hip-hop and country songs blasting from cell phones.br /div/divbr /divThe Horntones system won four Global Media Awards for “Best New Product” at the 2007 SEMA show, and DiMora is the first auto OEM to incorporate the technology in its product. The word is out on whether it would rate in a commercial truck, though. FMCSA regulations on horns (the applicable reg is a href=”http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/rules-regulations/administration/fmcsr/fmcsrruletext.asp?chunkkey=090163348002393e”§393.81/a) mandate only that the warning signal a horn is meant to provide be “adequate and reliable.” We suspect that, queued up correctly, a href=”http://www.horntones.com/tones.html”the General Lee horntone/a would be sufficiently startling, at least./divbr /li class=”social-digg”a onclick=”window.open(‘http://digg.com/submit?phase=2amp;url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’amp;title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title), ‘digg’); return false;” href=”http://digg.com/submit”Digg/a/lili class=”social-facebook”a onclick=”window.open(‘http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’amp;title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title),’facebook’); return false;” href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php”facebook/a/lidiv class=”blogger-post-footer”Channel 19 is the blog version of the column of the same name featured in Overdrive: The Voice of the American Trucker. Todd Dills ([email protected]) is its author./div