I always saw this as a great opportunity for personalization. People love to personalize their cars. Whether it’s a selectible engine note on a Tesla (“Let’s sound like a Porsche today!”) or a Leaf making droid sounds, it’s another opportunity for a driver to express themselves. If it also helps pedestrian safety, then it seems like a good fit.
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Why yes - it has happened to me more than once, and more than twice in fact, but here’s what I will tell you about. In the last six months, I have had two run-ins with Priuses (Prii?) where I was almost struck - the drivers in each case said “I assumed you knew I was there.”
One was in a gas station - I heard the tires crunching and literally jumped out of the way about two seconds before I would have been contacted by the front end of the silent vehicle. It would have been a slow-speed collision, but I don’t know what would have happened to me. Certainly nothing positive.
The other was in my own Elvis-damned driveway - I was facing the hatch on my station wagon, and turned around to find someone using my driveway to turn around, who was literally a foot away from me. In this case I didn’t even hear the tires on the pavement so it was like a ghost car appearing in front of me.
In both cases, the drivers claimed to be shocked that I hadn’t heard their near-silent cars.
How many times a day does this happen to others? I dunno, but I would bet my favorite guitar that it is not zero.
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This is about parking lots, driveways, and crosswalks at < 10 mph.
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On my commute (on foot) to my office in Oslo, where shoveling sidewalks was not the norm, I had a stretch where I was forced to walk on the road. Electric cars creeping up behind me was very much a problem, it happened almost daily, and they’d be so close by the time I finally noticed them that I’d get startled and - since I was essentially walking on ice - I had a couple of falls. There was a much higher concentration of electrics there than here because of strong incentives (you got to drive in restricted lanes on the highway), but we are heading that way (hopefully).
A study in England funded by the found a 54% increase in pedestrian accidents from electrics and that electrics were 40% more likely to hit a pedestrian than an internal combustion vehicle, while the NHTSA study mentioned above quite clearly shows that low-speed pedestrian accidents were 38% more likely in an electric. What the latter study doesn’t do is show the accident was due to the sound of the car as opposed to Prius drivers just being bad drivers.
Anyone who insists this is a useless regulation is being a dick.
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That looks more like a driver failing to see a road was blocked off, and then failing to see a pedestrian? How tf is the runner at fault here?
Well, since you were stopped, if he hadn’t looked up, he just would have hurt his shins and it would have been his fault, not yours…
I guess I would prefer a car that continually said vroooom, vroooom.
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Jeez, let’s hope that rule gets repealed. What an incredibly bad idea. One of the many advantages of electric cars is they don’t produce as much noise pollution as gas powered cars. Let’s not try to mandate that they do after all.
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That fault wouldn’t have been mine, but I still would have been a dick!
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That’s the one. Intro and everything!
The sound doesn’t need to be loud, just something that a pedestrian or a guide dog can hear from a few feet away.
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I want my engine to purrrr. 
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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking through a parking lot or garage and almost been run over by a basically silent EV or hybrid (and they are legion here in Seattle).
Speaking as someone that has been hit by a car as a pedestrian, I can tell you it’s no fun at all. Even at low speeds, it can mess you up pretty badly.
Nobody is asking for 100dB siren to be attached to every vehicle, just something to let others know that you’re there.
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I’d be flooring my wah wah pedal to the metal!
My sound preference would just be the sound of driving on gravel.
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#Poseurs
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Why not both?
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Yes. If people get to choose their own, you know somebody’s going to set theirs at 100 db.
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