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Comment by namecheapTA | Hacker News Reader

Atleast when a Dodge Charger is charging up from behind, I can hear the thing. Pedestrians can hear the thing.

When the demographic that currently commits most reckless driving eventually adopts electric cars, it's going to be a blood bath.

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Way back when EVs/hybrids were first hitting the market, I remember some chatter about basically adding an external speaker to play fake engine noises. Not perfect, but it might help a bit.

I've personally encountered a decent number of Tesla/e-bike drivers who have... nonstandard views on what a stop sign means, and the fact that the vehicles are silent is always a bit disconcerting.

Most EVs do have such a speaker. But it only plays when they're driving at low speeds where they could be a threat to pedestrians, bikes, etc. And also there's no standardization of the noise.

All EVs have a speaker and the noise is standardized. The problem is there is a different standard in each country and the solution is to make one noise which covers all of the standards - thats why it ends up sounding so strange. The combination of the various standards varies from OEM to OEM - thats why it ends up sounding different OEM to OEM.

I mean... maybe in the US? Here in Canada all the EVs seem to make a different noise. The noise my Volt makes is entirely different from my friend's 2nd gen Leaf, for example.

Maybe that's changing with the latest round of vehicles, but I don't recall hearing about any regulation passed.

That’s an interesting observation that I hadn’t considered. My enthusiasm for EVs has been pretty unmitigated previously. I still think climate is important enough that dealing with the safety stuff is probably tractable and also the lesser evil, but it’s good to have line of sight on it.

Unmitigated? Are you not worried about the infrastructure impact of doubling the weight of most classes of vehicle?

Heck, even the safety aspect. And the mining of materials. The recycling aspect (or lack there of), or the disposability of the vehicles if the battery/charging system bricks itself. The Chevy Volt forums are full of people losing thousands of dollars because their low miles car worth about $10k, needs a $10k battery module or two.

Well, we're talking about the safety aspect right now. I'm not particularly worried about the mining of materials or even the disposability because (1) those are tractable problems and (2) ICE cars do many orders of magnitude more damage to the environment even ignoring their associated manufacture and disposal costs.

I'm not really. The vast majority of infrastructure degradation is because of trucks which weigh 100 times as much as cars. Their weight will be decreasing by a much smaller factor.

A Tesla Model 3 weighs 3,582 lbs. Even if you chose a Smart Fortwo (1,984lb) as your comparison instead of an equivalent-size ICE vehicle, it's still not doubling the weight.

That is the lightest variant of the Model 3. Every other Tesla, save the Roadster, weighs over 4,000 lbs: https://electrek.co/2021/08/02/how-much-does-a-tesla-weigh-c... Many are over 5,000, for a sedan/compact SUV.

My compact SUV is 3,000 lbs. The sedan I used before that was less than 2,500 lbs.

And it's not like Teslas are exceptionally large vehicles. The Cybertruck is probably going to clock in at 7,000 lbs or so.

None of Tesla's sedans or compact SUVs are over 5,000lbs. Their only vehicle over 5,000lbs is the Model X, their big SUV. The only ICE vehicle you mentioned that weighs less than half of that was a sedan. And the Cybertruck is going to be in the same class as the F-250, the lightest of which is 5,677lbs.

My e-bike weighs a lot less then the car it replaced.

No, because it's still going to be negligible compared to the wear done by trucks. The average 18-wheeler weighs ~80-90,000 lbs, and the relationship between wear and weight is exponential, not linear. So while 25 Teslas weigh the same as a single 18 wheeler, the 18 wheeler contributes a lot more to road wear than those 25 Teslas. And in any case, infrastructure costs are going to be a rounding error to the economic costs associated with climate change.

> Atleast when a Dodge Charger is charging up from behind, I can hear the thing.

Do you mean while driving? How does that work? Even with my windows open I can't hear vehicles until they're at least next to me. I don't have a loud vehicle and hearing tests show I have good hearing.

Either dodge chargers in your area don't have the loud exhausts that they do here in California, or you have a problem of some sort. Loud noises bounce off the road, off buildings. Basically the reason you can hear someone talking yell even if they are facing away from you.

Maybe it's because I rarely drive in cities where there are buildings around for the sound to echo. 95% or more of my driving is in the country at 45 MPH or higher, or on highways at 65 or 70MPH. There are plenty of very loud vehicles in my area. Maybe the sound just can't go as fast as I'm usually driving. Or an idea I just thought of, maybe at the speeds I typically drive, by the time the sound does get to me, it's not enough to hear over my tires?

Yes, obviously the danger of getting passed by a much faster silent vehicle is much less in an area with low traffic density, low intersection density, yada yada. I'm glad we finally got to the bottom of your confusion.

We didn't though.

Edit: Also I feel like, from your last reply, that you might have taken one or both of my replies in a way that wasn't intended. It's also possible that I didn't word my replies in a good manner. I'm not always good at that. I am genuinely curious about how it is that others can hear loud vehicles behind them when driving while I can't. Your mention of echoes off buildings got me thinking of driving through a big city surrounded by big buildings, and that's an environment I am not familiar with except in pictures and videos. If that's the reason then it answers the question I've had for a couple years now when I first saw someone mention that they hear loud vehicles behind them.

I was recently driven by someone in an EV in a busy parking lot and the amount of pedestrians that were entirely not aware of our presence as we slowly creeped up behind them was disturbing. Some even had to be horned. Ten or twenty years ago, people would notice you approaching just from the engine sound and naturally move aside or at least turn around and look.

The fact that the artificial sounds some of them have are not all that different from the sound of the wind doesn't help either.

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