I have an advanced honking technique where I form my hands into fists and gently pound on the horn pad with the ulnar sides, alternating fists, as one might pound on a tabletop. This results in a sound not unlike a bugler issuing short and somewhat soft notes rapidly.
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Admittedly this is a sneeze sound, but…close enough?
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They don’t magically have any better or worse hearing then anyone I agree that is a misconception for sure.
There are actual differences though, like how much attention they give to alternate sensory input which also leads to the reinforcing of those neuropathways. They are typically more attuned to whatever hearing/touch/smell they do have as they are required to rely on their other senses to a much larger degree, which in turn increases the neuropathways dedicated to processing those senses. So maybe not so much a stereotype as it is a misunderstanding?
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I like the crackly rocket boom idea.
I’ve been told the crackling is not mics clipping like I expected but real and caused by the supersonic speed of the exhaust.
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To my mind, the amount of GFY conveyed is directly proportional to the length of the toot, with anything under 0.3s or so translating as ‘hey.’
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Oh Cory. This would be delightful. I want my car to have the screams of the damned as its engine tone.
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ok after reading all the responses obviously one big money center for your new Apple Car will be downloadable engine tones.
tones.app will give you unique tones that complement each other across your many apple devices so you will always be able to recognize that’s my tone on device X.
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Consider the combination of this tech with the tendency of young males to make their vehicles obnoxiously loud.
Oy vey.
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I don’t think those sort of people are driving electric cars.
Though I admit I am stereotyping.
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And then they get pulled over by the cops and given a ticket for disturbing the peace. If they keep doing it, the RMV or DMV could suspend their license until they agree to turn down the volume. From the Massachusetts RMV two of the reasons to suspend a license are:
Below is a list and brief description of these types of suspensions and revocations: ... Complaint of Improper Operation: Pending a court hearing, law enforcement may request the RMV's support in removing a driver from the roadways. ... Complaint General: Miscellaneous police complaint.
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Excellent point. But as a cyclist, even the short toot has me jumping out of my skin. I don’t infer malice for the most part, though.
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I think cars should have two horns. A friendly beep beep and a more warning like HONK HONK!
The beep beep would be great for just making sure people know you are there, and like if you see someone you know and want to say hi. Something friendly and less startling.
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In my experience the “yo cyclist, I am driving a car right behind you” honk is usually the result of good intentions, but often worse than useless.
I guess on the road it’s natural to be very aware of tire and engine sounds in the roughly 160º blind spot in the back of one’s head, and cars aren’t as quiet on the outside as it feels to the driver. So a point-blank HEY THERE blast is more startling than informative.
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A valid application of the precautionary principle, well stated. I have noisemakers on my cars, and I have not disabled them, although I easily could.
You brought that up, not me. A blind person, commenting on this about a year ago I think, said the same thing as @d_r - a person with normal hearing can typically hear tire noise from approaching cars. No super-hearing required, you just have to be paying attention to the aural environment instead of your iPhone.
Saying bad science is bad science is not an attack on blind people.
Regardless of whether you agree with the conclusion or not, the NHTSA report was bad science, that you can easily debunk yourself in less time than it takes to argue with me. EVs and PZEVs have roughly the same rate of pedestrian/car accidents as gas cars in the same environment, it only looks different if you fail to control for the fact that gas cars dominate in environments where there is little or no charging infrastructure, and those environments have significantly lower incidence of car/pedestrian accidents, dragging the numbers down for gas cars unless you do the science properly and control for demographics.
This law, as I understand it, does not require silent cars to have noisemakers. All cars except EVs and PZEVs are allowed to be perfectly silent, in fact they are allowed to have noise-canceling systems. The law is based fundamentally on bad science, false information, as is the advocacy group recommendation others have mentioned.
Wouldn’t a law that set a minimum noise standard for all cars, instead of purposely penalizing only clean cars, be a better law?
Telsa is the only vendor I know of that does not already have noisemakers on their EVs. This is either bad science driving bad legislation, or a pious nanny-state justification of market destabilization purposely targeted at Elon Musk, in order to drive up his costs because he’s bringing clean, safe cars into the economic range of regular people. Either way, it’s a bad law, and it doesn’t make me an enemy of blind people when I say it’s a bad law.
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Your actual words were
Thus implying that all blind people have better hearing than you do. That may be true in the case of the individual who you were referring to but it certainly isn’t the case for all blind people.
I agree with you there, but unless I’m mistaken there are currently no gasoline-powered cars on the market that can run as quietly as all-electric cars so the point is academic for the time being.
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The implication was unintentional and I’ll go fix it, thanks. I’ll change it to “people with normal hearing”. I am literally more than half deaf, I have scarred eardrums.
I believe you’re mistaken. There are cars with active noise-canceling systems, intended to reduce in-cabin noise, and there are also cars with less engine noise than the inverter noise constantly emitted from my all-electrics when they are moving. At this point several gas car vendors are already voluntarily fitting their cars with noisemakers, just as most EV vendors voluntarily do.
I am super attuned to that sound, since we have a long gravel driveway. That sound means I have to be aware of what is happening and ready to react, just in case it’s bad. It will wake me out of a dead sleep. If I heard it everywhere, it might make me even more anxious.
I can deal with this problem by very rarely leaving the property. Problem solved!
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And someone else will set it to a human voice saying “hey, move it, asshole”.
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