Amazon electric vehicle makes an unpleasant sound

JFC but that’s utterly awful! Yes a sound is needed but not a fucking musical chime, FFS. What the hell were the Amazon people smoking?

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I agree with you. I take daily walks through my neighborhood, and I’ve made these observations:

  • modern combustion-engine cars make very little engine noise
  • electric cars like Leafs and Teslas make about the same amount of noise as CE cars (tires on asphalt; not loud, but adequate enough to alert me to their presence)
  • many, many, many people walking or running wear earbuds, so they don’t hear much of anything anyway
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Aztec death whistle?

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Yeah, but we’re talking about AMURICA where car is king!

No. Because Amazon is nothing like the Doctor.

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If the volume level is anything like the VESS on our all-electric Hyundai, then no - it’s loud and clear inside, even with all the windows rolled up.

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Like a foley artist’s toolkit from a Hitchcock movie. I love that, but if I heard it all the time on the street, it might get a bit old.

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The minute it becomes legal/technologically-attainable to update our EV, it’s getting the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang sound!

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What, no mention of the original crazy frog video yet?

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I’ve been idly thinking about this as I walk to and from work, and occasionally almost get cleaned out by quiet vehicles. I think it’s probably a difficult problem. I spend, uh, a lot more time that I probably should playing video games, and almost invariably soon get sick of the repetitive music and noises, and end up playing in almost total silence, in part because I can. I think sound effects on electric vehicles will suffer similar problems - from the drivers perspective almost any sound effects are going to become repetitive and intrusive and eventually grating to the point where they’re disabled or destroyed.

It also seems kind of a shame to spend all this time and effort creating quiet transport, to then go back and overlay it with artificial noise. “Open All Hours” had a charming opening sequence that had an electric milk cart rolling around the early morning streets, unobtrusively delivering milk to the slumbering occupants.

Some adaptive form of noise generation would be good, I think. As a bare outline: As the speed of the vehicle increases on the assumption that open road travel will generate a fair bit of tire and wind noise anyway, and there’s unlikely to be any pedestrians and cycles around. Similarly, as speed falls below - say - 10km/h the noise drops away on the assumption that the driver is paying much more active attention and an accident at that speed is going to be fairly harmless.

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You know the car is there though right? Being annoyed by bright headlights is better than being suddenly overtaken by a car and possibly run over. That’s the point.

14sf1o

UncomfortableThirstyBoa-max-1mb

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I propose this:

Honestly the music from Moon Patrol cycles through my head at least once a week or so anyway.

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How about Pac Mac or Ms. Pac Man? Wacka-wacka-wacka.

I agree EVs need to make sound. Probably best to limit it to “motor-like” sounds, since that’s what we’re used to.

But man, I’d love to hear the cacophony if everyone could choose their own sounds. Even without regulations, we’d likely end up back to a reasonable normal soon. Remember when cell phones were new and everyone had loud and annoying ring tones? Pretty sure that fad’s over.

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Nah, use this guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSgYtmCnyYw

Most importantly standardization means that people would recognize the sound as a vehicle. Nonstandard sounds could be mistaken for something else, Although this sound is kind of irritating, let’s look at what it gets right. It appears to be fairly broad spectrum, which is important because those sorts of sounds are easier to localize than single frequency sounds. And it appears that the pitch varies with the speed, which gives the listener important information.

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Whelp, as somebody living with the aftermath of multiple TBIs, no. I can’t see and lose all spatial awareness. Imagine how that feels while driving a car or truck. I avoid driving at dusk.

As an aside, I walk around a (strangely quiet due to landscape) part of city a lot and frankly don’t agree about the average level of a new car’s engine noise. Sure, the electric car noise is a thing at the 47-67 decibel range but no ICE car in the neighborhood is as quiet as an electric car.

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I mean, they could have given it any sound they wanted. Ferrari F40, Harley Davidson, Imperial Tie Fighter, anything! And they chose this.

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Frogger would be another good one.

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Being literally unable to see the road surface in front of me because all I can see is headlights is a major hazard. I’m not concerned about the car- I’d be able to see it with the lights at half the brightness- I’m concerned about everything else. Because I can’t see any of it.

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