Okay, but where’s the fake choke?
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#NeverForget
Who cares what they sound like as long as they are audible? There’s no reason an electric car needs to sound like a gas-guzzling behemoth as long as it makes enough noise that people don’t accidentally step off the curb in front of one.
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A stick shift car that doesn’t roll backwards on a hill would be pretty sweet, tbh.
Maybe bird calls, or animal noises.
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A recognizable hazard is quicker to be identified and reacted to than a new one. Making people learnnew hazard sounds is not helpful in making them safer.
Hyperbole much? The primary sound from a vehicle at high speeds is tire noise, whether it’s EV or ICE. It’s at low-moderate speeds that a recognizable engine sound would be beneficial for instinctive avoidance. It doesn’t have to be loud and it doesn’t have to sound like a truck or SUV with straight pipes. 
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Our bolt sounds like a choir of angelic bees.
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I used to own a car which had an auxiliary crank start, and it was genuinely useful when the battery died. But I much prefer my Renault Zoe.
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Admittedly one of the olds, but I didn’t realize how much I relied on auditory cues while driving until I drove an EV.
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Oh yeah, I used to have one on my bike!
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I want farting noises on mine.
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The only controls a car needs, are: 3 pedals and a gear stick, left/right, stop/go, loud/quiet and hot/cold. My car is almost old enough to vote, and it has buttons that I have no clue how to use.
My lawn. You are on it.
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Hah! As a child, I used to regularly walk into the road in front of cars, because normal families had quiet, water-cooled motors, and we had a shonky old VW Bug that sounded like a bag of spanners being thrown down some steps.
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I was responding to your comment saying it’s problematic that an electric Toyota “doesn’t sound like a 4000lb SUV.”
As long as the vehicle noise is both audible to pedestrians and recognizable as an object in motion then the sound serves its purpose. This plan to add additional “vroom vroom” sounds just for the sake of nostalgia is pretty silly.
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Whatever the sound is, it needs to be standardized and widespread. There are a lot of sounds in an urban environment. If I hear the latest pop hit as I’m about to step out into the street, I shouldn’t have to look if it coming from a nearby window, someone with their phone turned up annoyingly loud or a car company that thought they were being clever.
Please no. A sound that is meant to keep people safe should be immediately identifiable as the hazard it is, not a common background noise in the same environment.
Or we could treat the large machinery that kills tens of thousands of people a year like the risky tool that they are, instead of a toy.
I think the vroom vroom is one of the better options available for low speeds (at high speeds other sounds win, so go silent). People are already trained to recognize it as a hazard. Long term I’d like to see us standardize on a single known type of sound, ideally with well planned qualities (audible in a band that will be heard by the most people, with fade characteristics that minimize the sound outside of the area of concern). Instead every company is going their own way and we’re getting the worst of both worlds, all the noise pollution without the obvious hazard warning.
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I always feel like ours is loud enough. Of course, I’m usually in it, so I guess my perspective is wrong.
An alternating pitch sound so you can tell if it’s coming or going would be better with that goal.
No reason to be constrained to the sound of an engine. 115 years ago, nobody made the car sound like horse. 115 years from now, if an EV sounds like a gas engine, people will wonder why. They’ll adjust to whatever sound quickly.
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115 years ago (or half that) nobody gave a shit about vehicle safety.
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