This. This. This.
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I know Volts have a pedestrian alert sound that basically sounds the horn softly… surprised other hybrids/electrics don’t.
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You’re a rare one. Hard to count the number of times I’ve had to dodge a bike who wouldn’t follow the zebra crossing rules. It’s even raised opposition to bike lanes here… dangerous enough crossing the road when the bike don’t have a dedicated thoroughfare. Put all the bikes on one road and you have a Critical Mass situation.
Put so many quarters into that damned thing I should own the rights to the song already!
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You’re trolling me, Cory? 
I was only in the woods for four days, jeez.
EV noisemakers are a ridiculous convergence of bad science, misinformation, and bad policy at both the corporate and governmental level. They don’t actually hurt anything directly, but they are a great example of misguided government overreach, a poster child for those who resent the “Nanny State” and thus a vote generator for right-wing laissez-faire types. They are unlikely to save any lives, blind or otherwise.
Last I heard all shipping EVs and hybrids in the USA other than the Teslas already have noisemakers. The law requiring them was set to be implemented in 2015, but then was supposed to be pushed back to 2018, but according to Cory’s link is now set for 2019. By which time everyone will know how stupidly bad the “science” supporting them is.
History! The NHTSA did a numerical analysis of car/pedestrian accidents comparing a few hybrids to supposedly equivalent cars. They compared the Prius to the Corolla, I seem to remember, but bad comparisons weren’t the base problem with the analysis. In the study, it was found that accidents involving hybrids and EVs occurred at about the normal frequency for large complex city driving environments, which is notably higher than the frequency of accidents involving the “equivalent” cars for the USA overall.
By consulting rabbit entrails and howling at the moon, the conclusion was reached that hybrids are dangerous, because they are quiet. There is literally no investigation or evidence for this conclusion whatsover in the data. It’s a complete fantasy spun by the report authors in a failed attempt to recognize the reasons for the difference in numbers. The real reason is that silent cars are more prevalent in built-up environments where accidents involving pedestrians are more prevalent. It has nothing to do with sounds, as a later NHTSA report proved.
Think it out, clearly: In order for it to be true that engine noise is the issue, people would have to be leaping out of the way of oncoming gas cars because they heard their engines - all the time, like every day. In Real Life™ this almost never happens - have you ever seen it happen? Has it happened to anyone you know?
It’s arrant nonsense, and therefore we have to have a law based on it. Hooray for our government… I wonder why people don’t like it.
I don’t mind my noisemaker; the only thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t make the Jetson’s car sound (thanks, @deejayeetee!).
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Horses trotting, plus the occasional Frau Blücher whinny, may suit.
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You don’t notice the ones following the rules, only the ones who don’t. I can’t tell you how often I’ve had to dodge automobiles ignoring zebra crossing rules as a pedestrian, or how often I’ve had to dodge cars going through stop signs or making illegal turns while I was on my bike. I find myself a lot more aware of rule breakers when I’m vulnerable and not protected by a big metal box.
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There’s also the useless stuck-in-traffic honking, which an ex of mine used to interpret as, “I’m so lonely!”
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this is actually a great idea for all types of cars as @Jamie and @winkybber point out.
the good news is, there is very little preventing anyone from implementing this. rigging a bike bell to some pipe or hose on the undercarriage/under the hood of a car (or just bolted directly to the inside of the wheel-well or something) with a braided cable in a housing (standard for a variety of car and bike mechanical stuff) attached to the clapper lever on the bell end and pretty much any type of pull or lever you want to make/repurpose on the driver’s end and you’re in business. figuring out where to route the housing from exterior to interior would be the only part specific to your vehicle.
I have bells on both my bikes, and if I ever get another car, I’m totally doing this.
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This isn’t even academic. Just as I pulled into the garage at work, there was a fellow on his cell phone walking down the middle of the ramp. I stopped since I wanted to give him a fair shot to move to the side – but that ended even the rolling motion of the tires – and he kept walking right toward me. Every second I let go without hitting the horn was a second I lost to the battle to not seem like an asshole when, as I soon must, hit my horn at a closer range than before to have him avoid crashing into my front bumper.
It was like Miss Manners rewriting “The Cold Equations.” I don’t want to be a dick, but if he gets much closer, I’ll sound like even more of a dick. And my obligation to be a dick to avoid a collision isn’t even my fault! He’s not paying attention! He’s in the wrong place. But I can’t not be a dick if I want to avoid being a bigger dick still.
Fortunately, deus ex machina, he looked up about half a step before walking into my front bumper.
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I’ve noticed that even with internal combustion cars often most of the noise is coming from the tires. At least when they are moving 30+ mph.
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I want the Enterprise engine hum, personally.
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Some stand-up comedian had a bit about how difficult it was to express rage through the horn of an old VW beetle. No matter how hard you hit the thing it just makes a friendly “meep!”
I suppose that’s why Herbie the Love Bug didn’t get a cameo in Maximum Overdrive.
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Did I forget a key scene? Man, Stephen King must have been on some primo coke during that film.
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Or just “people in general, and visually impaired people in particular, are less likely to step into a crosswalk if they hear a car coming.”
Imagine how much more dangerous crossing the street would be if you couldn’t look both ways first. That’s every day for blind people. Taking audio cues away makes it even worse.
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Again, this would be observable. How many times this year did you not step into a crosswalk because you heard a car engine coming? In the case of blind people, that would be zero times - how many times did it happen to you? It’d need to be about fifty times for this to be a viable explanation for the numbers, which are already explained in an easier, more accurate way.
Because this is extremely relevant to my interests, I read both the NHTSA reports. The one with the bad conclusion unsupported by the data, and the one with the urban/rural/national numbers. The data is very clear. And also I talked to a blind person about it; his take was actually very interesting. He was insulted that anyone thought he needed a noisemaker in order to hear a car coming; he said that he can clearly hear the tire noise from any vehicle unless it’s too far away and coming too fast for a noisemaker to be of any use anyway.
I still haven’t read the third NHTSA report that shows noisemakers are useless because physics, but I’ll get to that one soon.
I don’t have to imagine, we have the numbers. The data exists and is easily interpreted. Noisemakers don’t help blind people avoid cars in crosswalks. Noisemakers don’t help blind people except in such rare circumstances that you can’t even quantify it, you have to make up movie-theater scenarios.
There are audio devices at regulated intersections that do not rely on cars; I can’t hear them because my hearing sucks, but blind people people with normal hearing can. Those do work. Car noisemakers don’t, because they solve a non-existent problem.
Edit: remove unintentional implication that blind people are never hearing impaired.
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This is just plain a terrible idea. There is enough random crummy noise in the world already - having more of it, at the whim of every jamoke who thinks his school’s fight song or Zena battle cry would be an awesome sound to play while driving is a recipe for great daily sadness.
We already know what happens when a centralized group of thoughtful, careful sound engineers stop working on audio problems - the loss of sound quality in phone communications since the 80s when AT&T stopped being the sole phone company. Yes, things got better phone service-wise, but the sound quality got worse.
I’d love to see the sounds be a choice of two - a “standard” ICE sound, and some kind of electric whine sound that doesn’t get whiny and buzzy.
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“Blind people all have Daredevil super-hearing” is a stereotype that needs to go away. They can suffer hearing loss just like anybody else.
If advocacy groups for the blind say they’d like noisemakers to help them stay safe I’m not going to tell them their concerns are unfounded.
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