If beepers are a problem for you, be careful getting into newish Toyotas. They are truly great cars - as long as you only look at the drive train and body, that is. The cockpits are ergonomically nightmarish.
Along with such idiocies as a backwards shift pattern and switches that cannot be seen by the driver, the 2012 plug-in Prius has a back-up beeper that beeps continuously while in reverse. But not outside the car like a Nissan or a garbage truck, it actually beeps inside the car. It’s barely audible outside.
You can pay a Toyota dealer $75 to cut it down to a single beep (you actually need that single beep, since the stickshift lever is 180 degrees out of line with any sane design) or you can hack it yourself through the ODBC interface, but most people probably don’t.
I hope this warning helps somebody, if not yourself. Good luck!
I don’t understand why anything without that blind spot directly to their rear should have a backup beeper at all. Of course with that blind spot it may be the best presently-legal option.
In all honesty given unlimited noise pollution stopping power, I’d start with three things. My upstairs neighbor in heels for an hour every morning at 5am, loud motorcycles and mating cats in the alley. I tell you, if there really is an expectation that we’re all going to live in cities one day, they’re really going to have to work on apartment soundproofing.
Well, you remember that I mentioned the stickshift is backwards?
The car has a very sophisticated transmission, nothing like a standard manual or automatic tranny. It’s truly a brilliant design, but Totoya gave it an absurdly bad user interface, and they’ve made it worse in each version I’ve owned. Since the control is entirely electrical, they could have had a row of buttons, or they could have emulated a traditional stick shift, or a traditional automatic transmission lever, or invented something based on petting fluffy bunnies whilst humming. Really, the sky was the limit, they could have done anything.
So what they did was maximize the chances of accidentally putting the car in reverse.
If you want to go backwards, you push the stick forwards. If you want to go forward, you pull the stick back. The control is styled and positioned to resemble a stick shift, so it’s anti-training for anyone who also drives stick - reverse is exactly where first gear would be on any vehicle with sane ergonomics. It deprograms muscle memory, which is what you rely on in an emergency, and it violates the design principle of congruent mapping - one should push forward to go forward, and push back to go back, unless a mechanical shift linkage makes that impossible.
Anyway, at some point Toyota apparently realized that people were accidentally throwing their cars into reverse all the time, and instead of fixing the basic problem, they invented another anti-feature - the in-car backup beeper. So now you get audibly reminded of how stupid and dangerous the design is every time you back up, yay! But I have to admit it’s kept me from backing into a few things.
I could go on - just in the stickshift alone there are several more antifeatures, and that’s without getting to things like the off-center backup camera that you can’t turn on except by putting the car in reverse, but I’ll spare you the rest of the diatribe. It sometimes seems like Toyota read Don Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things and implemented anything the book pointed out as confusing or potentially lethal to end users.
Reminds me of a guy in our town complaining about the noise from a photo-voltaic array a local company installed that bordered his home. (No mention of the railroad tracks behind his lot, and he was lucky they didn’t build an abattoir.)
There’s a windfall on top of a skyscraper in portland where the blades all have this swept-back washout at the tip. I have to figure that’s so they make less noise. If helicopters can really have a stealth mode, why not windmills?
Add to that preschoolers that run laps for hours indoors every Saturday morning, and the clubhouse turn involves leaping off the couch. And my GF’s upstairs neighbor was a nice senile lady who would get up at 5:00 AM and vacuum her apartment every day.
the many times per day I am confronted by needlessly difficult/dangerous interfaces or industrial design, I see red. I often wish there were some form of accountability or public shaming for the designers (or equally likely, sabotage by their money-minding middle-management) but it’s probably for the best that I don’t know who these people are, as I would shortly be sent to the chair for murder.
I don’t understand why these things bother me so much more than regular folks, but they absolutely do.
I can see it being annoying for people who live nearby.
I live 4 miles as the crow flies from a handful of newer turbines with no obstructions other than a few trees between us. In the middle of the night when it’s perfectly quiet, they sound like constant, distant highway traffic. That noise didn’t exist before they were erected a few years ago.
There’s a qualitative difference between “perfect tranquility” and “less noise”. Unfortunately, both are undervalued-- perhaps recreational hearing damage is to blame.
i have no doubt hearing damage may be to blame, but it is much better–at least in blue collar town on the west coast of the US–then it was in my grandfathers day. we should aspire to make our lives and neighbors lives better, but for me living a mile away from I5 was worse than being a mile away from a turbine. also, a neighbor of mine sued another neighbor because of the noise his farm made during business hours in harvest season.
we all rarely get perfect tranquility, and if you have it i envy you. but the short brutish answer is most of us won’t (meaning we won’t trade work/commutes/friends/family/etc. for the location) so tradeoffs must be made.
i am not disagreeing with you, just talking about my own experiences
So make lemonade, like the Whooshies did at Appalachian State University when NASA put up an experimental windmill in 1979:
“The townies/students moved quickly, donning bedsheets and beads,
picking up drums and whatnot, and then racing up the mountain so that
when the film crew arrived at the top of the Knob, they found a bunch of
freaks sitting around chanting prayers.”
“When the TV people asked them who they were and what they were
doing, the locals gave them the straight-faced answer that they were
“Whooshies,” and that they worshipped the great windmill god “Nay-zuh”
(the windmill had “NASA” written on it) because it “brought energy from
the heavens down to the peoples of Earth.”
Under the right conditions, like across a valley, it’s easy to hear someone yelling from half a mile away or a dog barking.
For a lot of these people living on the plains, they have been living with around the clock wind noise even before the turbines were built. Presumably they don’t have trees or if they had trees they have hacked them down for being “too noisy.”
On the other hand, It’s possible to have a house near turbines and below the ridge line where they can hear the turbines but they are not used to having their house buffeted by the wind.
