Škoda’s bicycle bell is designed to cut through noise-cancelling headphones
Collisions between cyclists and headphone-wearing pedestrians are rising. Škoda's DuoBell uses a frequency gap to slip past noise-cancelling filters.
As cycling grows in major cities — London expects cyclists to outnumber car drivers for the first time this year — so does a tricky safety problem. Pedestrians wearing noise-cancelling headphones can't hear conventional bicycle bells, and collisions between cyclists and distracted walkers are on the rise. Škoda Auto, working with acoustic researchers at the University of Salford, has developed a solution with its DuoBell: a fully mechanical bicycle bell engineered to bypass ANC algorithms.
Through acoustic testing, the research team identified a narrow frequency band, between 750 and 780 Hz, that slips through ANC filters. The bell adds a second resonator tuned to a higher frequency and uses a specially designed hammer to produce rapid, irregular strikes — sound patterns that noise-cancellation software can't process fast enough to suppress.
The results hold up beyond the lab. In testing, pedestrians wearing ANC headphones gained up to 22 meters of additional reaction distance when the DuoBell sounded, a meaningful safety margin on a crowded city street. Real-world trials in London with Deliveroo couriers backed that up; riders reportedly wanted to keep the prototypes. Škoda plans to make the research publicly available, positioning the project as a wider contribution to urban safety than just one product by one brand.
TREND BITE
The DuoBell is a compact example of what happens when a legacy product, unchanged for over a hundred years, meets a radically different environment. It also fits a pattern of brands stepping into civic infrastructure gaps, taking on safety and wellbeing challenges outside their core business. For Škoda, a carmaker that started out making bicycles, the connection is natural enough to read as credible rather than performative. Sometimes the sharpest innovation isn't a new app or platform — it's re-engineering something unglamorous so it actually works in today's world.
