“A customer can have a car painted any colour he wants as long as it’s black,” said Henry Ford famously. Now, over a century later, the company he left behind is saying, ‘You can sleep anywhere you want as long as it’s a car.’ Ford Spain has created the prototype of a baby crib that will try its darnedest to prove that it is really a car and thereby fool your infant into falling asleep.
I know many new parents who will sell an arm and a leg to afford such a baby bed because which one of us hasn’t rocked and sung and paced and taken the baby for a long drive to make her sleep and she has woken up the instant we got home.
This prototype simulates the feeling of being in a moving car. The parents are supposed to drive around and record their car's motion and engine sounds using an app. The information is then uploaded to the crib, which then reproduces the exact same sounds and movement to lull the baby into sleep.
The idea is not entirely new. Last year, famous U.S. paediatrician Harvey Karp designed Snoo, a robotic crib that swivels gently and emits a gentle shushing sound to lull the infant to sleep, and has sensors that increase the movement and white noise when they sense the infant is disturbed.
Now, Ford’s Max Motor Dreams promises to do all this, and then some, with Ford’s famed motor technology behind it for extra punch. If the company does put this particular creation into production, we imagine a lot of happy parents would line up to buy it. At $1,160 a crib, Snoo is out of stock due to popular demand, says its website. So what price Max Motor Dreams? Move over, water beds, we predict adults might soon want a grown-up version of the car bed.
