That's why in the EU they have introduced requirements for electric cars to make artificial sounds. Sometimes one of them drives past and it sounds like a spaceship from a sci fi movie lol.
Just when significantly cutting noise pollution from motor vehicles in urban areas is finally within our grasp we toss it away by forcing them to make stupid and annoying UFO noises on the grounds of nebulous safety concerns.
There were any number of ways of solving this that would have been less annoying and better for peoples' health[0].
For one thing, most people are able to use their eyes and will learn soon enough that EVs don't make much noise at low speeds and will keep an eye out for them. How do I know this? I live in Cambridge, UK, which is brimming with cyclists. They don't make much noise either, but you learn to look out for them (and very quickly too).
And for those who are partially sighted or blind some sort of warning device + appropriate signal could no doubt have been engineered and legislated.
But, no, we've gone for stupid noises instead.
[0] We now, of course, know that noise pollution does in fact cause health issues and, I'd argue, these outweigh the safety argument.
Check out: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=815
What do you have in mind? I can’t think of anything as effective as sound—the blind person needs no special hardware to perceive it, and it can be easily spatially localized.
Noise pollution from ie ambulance, sports car, basically any motorbike, old car, trucks and so on is much much bigger. Where is your outrage for those?
And no, noise pollution from these cars discussed is not causing massive health issues that outweigh people getting maimed and killed by them, thats just your personal preferences (like not owning a car because you are young without a family etc) you would like to push on whole society for whatever personal reasons.
Maybe his personal reason is that he's absolutely capable of getting out of the way of a car, but he doesn't like noise. That's a reasonable preference. If you absolutely can't guarantee that a kid ends up under a car without the noise, fine, but I doubt that's true.
Sure, we dont live on this planet alone, but that seems like it's more justification for not intentionally making our shared space miserable, not less.
I've heard that some EV drivers turn off the sound because it annoys them. They are potentially setting themselves up for a lifetime of remorse.
They turn off over ~18MPH, though. After that, tire noise is much louder. As loud as an ICE car.
So, realistically, you’d hear a Prius if it’s going normal road speeds.
Side note: I wish the sound was more pleasant. When multiple cars are moving in a lot I call it the “choir of the damned”. They’re also louder than ICE cars and that’s kinda lame, we moved backwards WRT noise.
Are you saying the typical EVs you hear are _louder_ than ICE cars where you live?
As to the pleasantness of the noise - yeah, that seems to be a manufacturer's choice, or perhaps even driver choice? And let's hope just like annoying ring-tones of years past that the current selection dies out soon...
ICE cars are pretty quiet where I live. Either that or there is so much ambient noise that I've lost some of my hearing but either way I don't hear much of an engine noise with recent cars.
I don't know the people driving these cars well; perhaps they modded them (seems unlikely, given the neighborhood), or perhaps they're old enough to have escaped new requirements; regardless - they're too quiet here in my sample size of 1 neighborhood in NL.
Some have figured out how to disable it completely (just pulling the noisemaker causes a fault code to trigger) but quieting it down to roughly the volume of an ICE seems more reasonable to me.
Irrespective of the volume it is remarkable why any car designer thought that this was the right _kind_ of noise for the car to emit. Somebody chose that soundtrack, and you kind of have to wonder why...
Before this a Prius or any modern car would be dead silent at a stop because of stop-start technology. And even those small 1.6L don't make that much noise when idling.
Now you hear all these cars making their high-pitched UFO sound. And it is VERY irritating.