This is not the first time a car brand<\/a> has moved into adjacent safety or wellbeing territory.<\/p>\n What makes these two examples stronger is that they do not feel random. \u0160koda and Citro\u00ebn are both dealing with small but consequential failures around the trip itself, not trying to invent a new category for the sake of it. That is a more credible stretch because the problem sits close to how the brand is already experienced.<\/p>\n What \u0160koda and Citro\u00ebn are really addressing is mobility friction. Mobility friction is the small but consequential failure around a journey that changes safety, comfort, or control without changing the vehicle itself.<\/p>\n One brand is tackling external awareness around cyclists and pedestrians. The other is tackling in-car stress for pets. Different use cases, same underlying move. Both are extending the brand promise into the part of the journey where the consumer actually feels the problem.<\/p>\n \u0160koda starts with a simple failure. Standard bike bells are easier to miss when pedestrians are wearing active noise-cancelling headphones, or ANC, so the company worked with the University of Salford to identify a narrow 750 to 780 Hz band that cuts through ANC more effectively and built DuoBell around that finding. \u0160koda says the product also uses a second resonator and an irregular strike pattern to make the alert harder for ANC systems to suppress.<\/p>\n That line of thinking fits a brand whose history began with bicycles and that still maintains a visible connection to cycling today.<\/p>\n This lands because the fix is practical, easy to explain, and directly tied to a real safety failure on the street.<\/p>\n \u0160koda also has the stronger proof layer here. The idea is backed by publicly available Salford research<\/a>, and \u0160koda reports that testing showed pedestrians wearing ANC headphones gained up to 22 metres of additional reaction distance when DuoBell was activated.<\/p>\n This is the right kind of adjacent product move for an automotive brand.<\/p>\n\u0160koda and the new urban safety gap<\/h2>\n