Normal Operating Sounds
tesla.com
tesla.com
> Motor Humming or Whirring when Navigating to a Supercharger
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> In some circumstances (such as cold weather), it is normal for the motor(s) and components to make noise, such as humming or whirring as it generates heat to warm the Battery.
Super cool that the motors can be used for things other than moving the vehicle. It reminds me of how ESCs for RC vehicles use the motors to generate audible chirp tones to indicate status.
Motors are multi-purpose devices!
Since I live in the southeast, that's more than good enough to skip installing any auxillary heat source in the first place.
If "current" is higher than "target", the body invokes several mechanisms to bring the temperature down, such as turning up sweat production and making you feel hot; if "current" is lower than "target", it does the same to raise the temperature e.g. by shivering and making you feel cold.
(Fever also works by changing the target temperature of that regulation system, which is why you feel cold at the beginning when the target was raised to the fever temperature and hot at the end when it was lowered back to the normal body temperature)
So it makes sense to me that shivering doesn't make you feel warm, because both, the feeling and the shivering are efforts by the body to raise the temperature.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation_in_humans
I think there’s something else mentioned on that page that is a major contributor to feeling cold: redirecting blood flow away from the skin and in to the muscles (/organs)
Sounds like an excellent survival strategy - saves you, but leaves discomfort so you have an incentive to get somewhere safer.
0F ? That can't be right?
My Mitsubishi gives heat to around -31F (MSZ-RW Sumo)
However, they simplify their system design a little (fewer contactors, fewer wires, fewer components to buy/test)
Note however that both fans will typically be ~150 watts - which means that when heating they can't produce orders of magnitude more heat than that. So heat produced by the fan motor, even when run to generate as much heat as possible, probably won't be a very significant contributor to overall system heat output.
Don’t know if this is considered during installation?
The compressor is usually in the outdoor unit, because of noise, size, and proximity to the controls. It also is the item that consumes most of the power, so for minisplits, the outdoor unit is the part wired for high currents. It usually is wrapped in a nice insulating blanket (for sound as well), and vapor injection techniques used in cold climate pumps means the heat wasted is minimal.
Super Mario Wonder from Nintendo recently uses the vibration motors in your controller to play sound effects in some places which I thought was an incredibly neat trick.
Also my gaming PC in the winter. It feels like free compute given I’m heating anyways.
So there is plenty of waste heat to go around. Some diesels got so efficient though that they needed an extra in-line heater to have enough heat for the cabin in specific operating domains (low power engine, low revs).
It is effectively co-generation: you get two different kinds of energy (motive and heat) and you use them for different purposes.
Maybe it's like how I spend so much time reading random Wikipedia articles on topics because I need to know how everything works.
And that list is only getting longer, I think I'll pass it on to my kids.
Right now (and for the past couple of years) it has been mostly music but also still some more interesting tools to play with. Currently making a set of super realistic traffic lights for my youngest including pedestrian crossing and automatic cycle influencing (road coil pickup to detect car presence in front of the lights) for his model cars. Green wave, the works.
I've mostly stopped writing up the projects, but still have a bunch of posts pickled that I probably should finish. Most recent software bit: ear training module for pianojacq.com is work in progress (press low 'A' on an 88 key keyboard to enable the secret menu that will enable the ear trainer, it is not quite ready for mass consumption yet but it is getting there).
So I see people with diverse interests and kids and I just wonder: how!
I'm also an insomniac (it's 7:20 am here and I'm still awake...) so I have a ton of time when everybody is asleep (that's when I do most of my coding and reading), and when everybody is off to school I catch up on sleep. Not ideal but it mostly works. Another nice-to-have is that I can make ends meet with a relatively small fraction of the year spent on work (and that simply means I'm not reducing my savings, if I want to grow my savings I'd have to work more than that).
Thank you for that link!
I live on the top of a hill, so the first seven minutes or so of me driving anywhere is coasting at minimum engine power. Once air temp gets below 10C it's a long, slow painful wait for the vents to start blowing warm air. Especially unfortunate when you're waiting for the defroster to start doing something. I've considered installing a block heater, even though it wouldn't be needed to start the engine at all, just to warm the coolant up!
You may want to look into oil that flows better at low temps in winter based on what temperature your engine eventually reaches when it is fully warmed up. There is a good chance that your engine will work better with different oils for winter and summer, also if you have an older car you may get some mileage out of blocking off a piece of the radiator.
The number on the right is in the manual and you only change it when you go to the track.
Atm you're running a lighter oil than your car is designed to use and it's very likely to be a bad idea.
In the video you linked the only oils you can compare in the way he is comparing them are the 0w-20 and the 5w-20.
Later edit: I've watched that and since the tests the oils only at cold temperature it is entirely inconclusive wrt protection at operating temperature.
And cooking test is just dumb. Your oil rarely above operating spec. The only oil exposure to above spec temps is the oil in the top side while the engine is cooking after being stopped, and the oil in the burn chamber which burns and is then filtered out.
If you want to know how your oil is doing collect it after a service interval and send it to be tested.
The latter is also useful to check for impending headgasket doom (or cracks) before it is otherwise visible.
The cold starts aren't great for driver comfort, but don't seem to have a big effect on engine internals.
On my car even with the 0W30 in it in winter the oil pressure starts almost at the top of the scale and as the oil warms up it drops, by the time it is warm enough at idle it sits at the lowest point on the scale + 1 unit. If I use the more sluggish summer oil for too long in winter I'll see it peg the needle on the oil pressure meter, and I have no idea how high it really is. So there is a substantial difference between the two, running temp is more or less the same when the engine is well and truly warmed up.
Most diesel cars equipped with EGR also detect its (frequent in older cars) failures, but I suppose it's possible to have a fault without it being detected.
EGR is responsible for recirculating exhaust gases back into the intake primarily to increase efficiency, but a nice side effect is that it heats up the engine a lot quicker.
Also, many diesel cars sold around here since 2000 or so are equipped with a resistance heater that kicks in when the engine is cold. Perhaps that's different in other markets.
Efficiency does not need EGR. EGR only helps to keep NOX down when running efficiently. In some (many) vehicles EGR is disabled at cold temperatures.
Sure.. but try running that same engine when it gets too cold, which is why "block heaters" exist and get used in certain parts of the world. The operating temperature of the engine _is_ part of the design criteria.
Totally. If it's cold and you have an idle rig, you might as well use it to run a crypto miner before reaching for an actual heater.
In terms of heating systems though, it’s normal for fuel based systems to be <100% because you need to vent exhaust, and a lot of your heat your fuel produced can be rejected away from where you want it with that. For example, older gas boilers might only be 80% efficient or so, and even the much more efficient condensing boilers are still only in the low 90s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Principle_of_operati...
The majority does go to heat but you'll never hit the 100% threshold like other methods of heating can meet (or exceed)
A pure resistive heater is also less than 100% efficient, but it's very very close.
But by this construction, are all systems which take energy as input (and do not convert it to another form for storage) de facto 100% efficient?
When we talk about a (very old) furnace being 75% efficient at turning the chemical energy of a fossil fuel into heat energy, is the 25% loss purely combustion byproducts with some inherent chemical energy plus some non-combusted fuel?
So for a resistive electric heater, you're dissipating all of the energy as heat (minor quibbles about electromagnetic radiation or status LEDs aside). The same is true for your computer.
Burning hydrocarbons have two main sources of energy loss: incomplete combustion, and energy carried away by exhaust gases. Obviously furnace design influences both of these - the US federal minimum is 78%, but high-end furnaces with all the tricks can get over 90% per https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/furnaces-and-boilers
Heat pumps are the third major category, and they are more than 100% efficient because they are using their energy to steal a larger amount of thermal energy from the outdoors air and move it to inside your home (and much of the electric energy they consume is eventually discharged as heat inside your home as well).
But this is really just conservation of energy or the first law of thermodynamics, and those predate Planck.
They kinda work like a reverse refrigerator. A fridge takes heat out from the inside and moves it to the outside. A heat pump does the opposite.
> Actual heating systems can be better than 100% efficient, while crypto mining or cinebench or whatever is <100%.
The intricacies of why a crypto minor is less than 100% efficient when working as a heater are easily deduced, unless you’re precisely the sort of midwit that likes to leave replies such as the one you left.
Basically it's cool how cars do things largely on their own sometimes to stay within certain parameters.
20 years ago was 2003, which is practically yesterday [in my mind...].
-turbocharger overheats
-oil overheats And the things you stated and much more …
Better to let the motor run while standing is to run it the last kilometers in low rpm
If it happens a lot (when turned off) I'd think about having an inspection done. Worst case scenario, engine ends up overheating, warps or explodes, and you need a new one. Coolant system is one of those "oh shit" systems that you need to pay close attention to.
For those curious, the coolant around the engine block can boil and flow upwards after the engine is off, and the coolant circulation system is designed to handle this pattern. You can observe this yourself if you overfill your coolant and take it out on a hot day, the excess hot coolant will bubble up and run out for a good while after the engine is off.
I second the advice that if the engine isn’t overheating while running, everything is likely working as intended.
If I was a car manufacturer, I would wire the fan into the ignition circuit so it can never run with the ignition off - it's fairly useless to have a fan blowing on a radiator when the coolant isn't flowing anyway.
> Thats done to save a couple of cents on the ignition switch (no need for a large high current fan to be powered through it).
The fan must be powered by a relay in most cases so this is utter bullshit.
In most any modern car the fan is controlled by the ECM (a computer). Furthermore this fan relay will come on in anticipation of high heat load such as when the AC is turned on as well in cars without dual fans.
There is so much more complexity here than just wiring through the ignition circuit (which wouldn’t cost any more anyway as noted) that thinking this is a cost saving issue is utterly clueless.
And the temperature sensor that controls it is invariably located in the engine block, not the radiator hose. Modern cars may have multiple sensors but they need one in the block.
Cooling fans in most cars don’t draw 20 amps while running normally (they should be closer to 10), and while anything can fail the cooling fan in these setups should only run for a few minutes. Draining the battery like you claim is not a “common” cause of breakdowns.
You clearly don’t know much about modern (last >30 years) cars to be commenting on them so authoritatively, tone down your arrogance.
https://acurazine.com/forums/3g-tl-2004-2008-93/wiring-diagr...
This is a typical setup (and it’s 20 years ago). Debunking two of your claims. First note that the condenser fan is wired through the ignition, debunking the notion that it would be costly to do so and that running the main fan bypassed isn’t intentional. Also note that the actual fan control is the lower right black box PCM/ECM (engine computer)
Cars are like people. Sometimes a quirk is normal, and sometimes it means your bottom end is gonna fall out. Gotta get regular checkups and hope you catch it in time.
A further reason is no movement = no wind speed. I used to have an old Pontiac grand am with the ram air. I had overheating issues sometimes that were literally solved by going faster.
With carburettor fed engines it is sometimes advised by the manufacturer to allow the engine to idle for some time after running it at high RPM. This is because the effect of heat soak can be significant enough to boil all the fuel off in the carb, making the engine hard to restart when hot.
Before I looked up what it was, I kept hearing a gentle noise coming from the garage in the late evening. Figured it was noise from outside... Then one day I was out there and heard it start, realized it was the car, and looked it up.
Maybe this is what you're referring to. There are similar examples where people do this with old disk drives and printers too.
The floppotron
> Motors are multi-purpose devices!
In WALL-E, one of the robots following the title character, lacking any audio output, spins its motors at different rates to play the tune from Hello, Dolly! that it had learned from WALL-E.
See also the Floppotron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGfkPCZYfFw
This one is pretty good.
I also don’t like it, but it’s not Tesla’s fault that that’s where the market is. I’ve heard from so many foolish people who don’t understand physics that they feel safer driving a big heavy vehicle and being up high.
The armor has nothing to do with the height and sight lines; it’s also not anything specific to the Cybertruck. Even midsize SUVs now are so high up and boxy that you can’t see in front of the front bumper. I was in an Escalade or Expedition or Tahoe or something the other day on the way to JFK and noticed that the center console screen has an option to view a front-bumper-cam. It’s nuts.
If this is truly a problem that needs affirmative fixing, it seems that auto industry regulation (which is already mandating cellular transceivers in vehicles, so it is definitely in scope) would be the place to address this. Expecting market participants to kneecap themselves in the face of clear market demand (especially whilst already fighting the risky and uphill battle that is EV adoption) is not fair or realistic.
IMO it could be covered in giant sharp stainless steel hedgehog spikes and be nicknamed the Childslayer and it’s probably still less dangerous to our society than something that burns petrochemicals. If you want to regulate something for safety, ban the sale of gasoline/diesel and the use of internal combustion engines.
Not totally similar to your point as safety regs would be more equal, but it was an interesting revelation to me (especially as here in the EU small cars are much more desirable) that really market demands are as much of a driver of these things as manufacturer production.
Regulation has to be in the right place too, ideally giving the real trade off to the consumer. (the book suggests that if America taxed fuel more like the rest of the world so you didn't have such cheap gas, car efficiency would become a much bigger selling point, leading to more demand for smaller less ridiculous cars). But I suspect that would change less the demand for low gas cars, and more the demand for low gas tax politicians.
Also it was actually the gas efficiency regulation that started the arms race, because big trucks were exempt from the regulations so car manufacturers started pushing more people towards buying trucks instead of sedans.
Can you elaborate on this a little? I only took Physics up to University level so maybe I'm missing something, but - why _wouldn't_ that make you safer in the case of a collision? My naïve assumption is that it would:
a) decrease effective force on the passengers (greater mass of car => less acceleration from a given collision force => less force transferred to passenger)
b) make the car less likely to flip (assuming that the increased mass offsets the extra instability from the height of the vehicle - which, since the chassis is likely heavier on the bottom than the large hollow areas at the top, I think is likely)
c) move the passengers (slightly, but non-negligibly) out of the direct line of impact
"Driving a big heavy vehicle and being up high" might well make you _more likely_ to have a collision, meaning that you total aggregate chance of injury goes up even as "chance of injury, given a collision" goes down - but that's more about misunderstanding statistics than physics, as well as selfishly prioritizing personal safety over societal safety.
Thank you for helping me be less foolish!
Being out of the “line of impact” is mostly irrelevant when you are going 80mph and the vehicle hits something. That kinetic energy is going somewhere.
Large/heavy vehicles are less maneuverable and take longer to stop because of their increased kinetic energy at cruise. In collisions the massive added weight means they have much more energy that needs to go somewhere at time of impact.
The passenger safety of a car in a collision is not determined by which vehicle is still more car-shaped after the wreck, otherwise the bigger and heavier your vehicle, the better off you’d be.
Additionally, pushing around the big and heavy chassis uses way more energy unnecessarily, which is not crash safety related, but is still very unsafe due to the fact that burning petrochemicals is currently in the process of literally destroying our civilization. You might not crash, but you will burn.
The people at Tesla have a lot of fun even with the Cybertruck: why aren't the windows also bullet proof to small arms? Well, because it'd have to be really thick, and we recommend instead that you simply duck when shot at.
Citation/data needed. For a vehicle that does not have millions of miles in test or production usage, with all respect, this is a marketing statement. (Millions of miles is even low, a few hundred or thousand vehicles hit those numbers in no time)
One could say the truck is designed in that way.. but again, citation needed.
> There are distance sensors around the entire perimeter of the car that give you a visual and audio queue for when you're close to stuff, and there's cameras that also cover 360 degrees that show pedestrians and other obstacles on the navigation screen.
Are the majority of pedestrian collisions while backing up at low speed? Does this capability have anything to do with pedestrian safety vs not backing up into a mailbox? Will these cameras move the needle in any way for pedestrian fatalities after being struck by a vehicle?
Those have been gone a while. Just cameras now, and a lot of the functionality we had on earlier Teslas still lags behind on the newer camera-only cars.
If you want ultrasonic sensors and full 360 degree camera, you have to get something more advanced, like a Nissan Rogue. No joke ;-). Tesla does not offer this ability.
Basically, changes in temperatures are causing the pops. It's kind of weird and slightly annoying. Sometimes it happens for quite a bit after charging, particularly when driving through changing climate (i.e. climbing mountains). Having done Reno/SF round trips a good few times now, I've gotten used to it.
I have a room in my attic that can make really loud bangs on hot summer nights (enough to scare the crap out of me when I am concentrating on something and do not expect them) when it contracts again after a day in the heat. The root cause there is stick slip: the thing doesn't move for a long time due to its weight so tension builds up and then suddenly it will shift a little and the whole structure amplifies the sound from the shockwave passing through it.
Your 'pops' remind me of that (and supercharging must have some thermal effects).
Same thing apparently happens if you are heavy on regenerative braking when descending a mountain pass. Cold air, plus 50kW+ of regen braking is similar to just supercharging the car.
Shocked me the first time it happened. Cold (~5F outside), low and hot battery (just went from 80 to ~5%). Legit thought the car was on fire at first.
Thinking back to it, the battery must have been extremely warm at the time too, since that 5F was after two hours through a 2 lane mountain road (crossing the range).
Every single one of these could be engineered away. For example the pops and bangs at a supercharger is the metal shield deforming when heated. Instead, it should have circular ridges stamped into it around the fixing points to let it expand against the springiness of the steel.
The clunk noise from brakes could be engineered away by using stainless steel spring clips to prevent the pads being able to wiggle around in the calipers (used by many manufacturers already).
The clunk from the contactors opening/closing could be engineered away by having the contactors open/close far slower - with a proper precharge, no current is flowing, so there is no longevity benefit of fast close/open. Or... decide not to have contactors at all - I don't really see any reason they're needed, just keep the high voltage system always energized and design all the other components to have a suitably low leakage current. For maintenance and emergency de-energization, have a manual lever or a pyro-fuse.
But for a Model 3 where you need to carefully manage costs or you will either price yourself out of the market (and Tesla is already at the high end of it!) or go bankrupt I think you will have much bigger fish to fry than dealing with such noises.
You also obviously don't understand the engineering decisions - e.g. having the high voltage always on is not possible/allowed. It is a legal requirement because it must be possible to disable the high voltage circuit when doing maintenance on the car - or in the case of an accident. And it needs to switch off the moment the airbags activate, it is not only there for the firemen to turn off.
Also having the high voltage circuit off when the car is parked reduces the risks of fire should anything happen (malfunction, another vehicle crashes into a parked Tesla, etc.)
Manual lever is of no use in such situations. Pyrofuses Tesla already has.
I am aware of no law requiring that...
Plenty of other high voltage things are always on - for example the outlets in your living room are always live even if you aren't using the room.
The electrical danger of your house would be reduced by turning them off when you weren't in the room, but we decided it wasn't worth the complexity/cost to do so for the tiny benefit.
Electrical contractors in cars are in the same position IMO. It should be energised once in the factory, and then remain energised for the life of the car. Car service garages can have tools to de-energise and re-energise the HV system if necessary - rather like such tools exist to gas and degas aircon systems.
> The clunk noise from brakes could be engineered away by using stainless steel spring clips to prevent the pads being able to wiggle around in the calipers (used by many manufacturers already).
I've owned a lot of performance cars, and I don't know of any that didn't make noise. You're thinking of floating calipers, which are quieter and what most appliance cars use. Tesla is using fixed calipers, which most manufacturers only put on their performance trims. Making a bit of noise is just the nature of that design.
And the brakes aren't Tesla designs anyway, they're Brembo just like almost every other OE fixed caliper setup. I think Brembo knows how to make brakes.
If you "fix" these sounds in v2, then you'll still need to explain them in the manual for v1 owners.
Ultimately it's not really a bug. People aren't used to cars being so quiet so some minor new sounds suddenly stand out.
You clearly didn't read half of the article. 50% of these are purposeful chimes.
Also, why? What is the value of making a compressor or fan more quiet on the 3? It would be much better to lower the cost. Worry about the sound on the higher end vehicles but let the 3 be low cost.
Most of the time they operate with lots of ambient noise of the tires on the road and outside the car which probably makes a lot of these barely audible or noticeable.
At this point in the EV marketplace the I would say the answer is no to both questions. Tesla is far better concentrating their engineering teams on new products that can continue their growth.
Now if some competitor comes up with a perfectly quiet car and that becomes a selling point, then it is time to revisit the engineering.
Maybe muting sounds won't. But a general focus on quality will. There's a good amount of potential customers who consider Tesla low quality. There's a good amount of EV competitors who deliver better quality, these days.
And, more importantly, it might not sell more cars next quarter. But not doing that will lead to a continued decline in perception, and that is a price that's only paid a few years later.
Growth mattered above all when Tesla was creating the market. That is shifting right now, and a "new products! growth!" approach won't be the winning strategy for much longer. And, most importantly, cars are not software. You can't fix reputational issues with a patch.
If Tesla waits until the competitors are quiet, it's too late. "We're almost as good as our competitor" is not a helpful selling strategy for cars. For most consumers, a car is a long-term (4-8 years) commitment, bought on a very reputational basis.
Fast-forward a decade, and the bought-off regulators left for industry. The remaining transportation safety people in the US realized the tones are useless, since the sounds are not standardized and are therefore ambiguous and ignorable.
So, moving forward, they’ll standardize the noise, defeating its only practical purpose (branding). Sadly, they didn’t revisit whether it was actually necessary or helpful in the first place.
Our pre-tone EV makes plenty of noise at low speed due to various servos, capacitor whine, drivetrain gears/friction, and so on.
For example they removed the ultrasonic parking sensors. They removed the radar. In the next revision, they removed the stalks in favor of buttons on the steering wheel to control the blinkers.
The car is still expensive, but that’s down to in part batteries and the tech still being somewhat pricey, and in part just profit (contrast to e.g. Ford selling their cars at a loss).
I want to shave off every last ms of latency in the services I own but at the end of the day at some point it’s good enough (and best for the business) just to manage expectations.
Kind of shows where Tesla put its focus, and that there is work to do on future models. People used to higher end cars tend to notice and maybe not like the extra clunky bits, everything should just work smoothly and quietly.
That's kind of funny. Higher end cars are where you most commonly find fixed caliper brakes, and we are 100% used to the little noises they make. What's unusual here is Tesla choosing fixed calipers for an appliance car. So now we have people used to driving Priuses being exposed to mechanical sounds they're not familiar with.
That and electric cars are so quiet that you're going to hear things that are drowned out by an engine on other cars.
It would really be nice not to have to go in and try to imitate the sound to my mechanic, and it would help give me an idea what the repair ought to cost.
I've spent thousands of dollars on misdiagnosed (or misrepresented) "repairs," and it would be great to get a diagnosis from the mechanic, look it up, and say, "No, it doesn't sound a thing like that."
Recent sounds I've tried to imitate have included "I got a bad tank of gas that was 20% water, and it's January in New England, and ice is pinging around," "I think my muffler has a leak," and "Maybe one of my wheel bearings is going bad?"
I drive a 17-year-old car with 225k miles on it because I don't want to drive anything made after the advent of smartphones, so I get to make lots of funny noises. The muffler one and the wheel bearing seem like they should have been findable!
I don't have a Tesla, but I hear this sound in my own car, especially now that it's winter. I began hearing this after my recent car service that involved a ~real~ rear brakes replacement. When I took my car to the service guy, it was afternoon and I was no longer able to reproduce the noise.
This was driving me crazy until now! I now know it's nothing to worry about.
Before I investigated pads and discs, my first port of call would have been any ball joints. I don’t know the typical Tesla suspension make up but if there’s any bottom ball joint at the control arm / wheel carrier interface or tie-rod end, then that would be first.
Either way, definitely sounded like a failing ball joint to me. I’d want to visually inspect the dust boots for cracks, use a pick to check it’s still fully packed with healthy grease, then with wheels in the air, manipulate the wheel - hands at 12 o clock and 6 o clock, rock back and forth (testing bottom ball joint). Hands at 3 and 9 o clock (testing tie rod end).
Of course brake pads on discs can also fit the profile of “metal rubbing against metal with friction” but in that particular recording… unless the audio has been messed with (which from listening to some other clips I think they have applied some hi and lo cut with roll off in post)
Example https://www.audizine.com/forum/showthread.php/623429-New-Bra...
I suspect as I age my ability to hear such high pitched whine will be gone.
I suspect many of these noises are due to Tesla's notoriously poor build quality.
Not like cops will actually enforce it, but one can still dream...
I can see, and yet I've been scared more than once by an unusually quiet car behind me.
You basically call a number and then press a button on the appliance and it produces a sound that tells the customer service what's wrong.
... which is not that wrong with the Zoe. Especially the E-brake has some bark to it.
[Edit] Figured out Dark Reader extension is causing the crash. I turned it off for that specific site and it no longer crashes. Very strange.
I kinda want the ability to have that piped into the car. Make it sound like an R/C car.
Might want to keep chimes for emergency warnings where speech would be too slow, although there's an argument to be made that speech would still be better, since jarring chimes might scare you so much that you take just as much if not more time until you've identified the emergency.
But when they are supercharging they are both ridiculously loud. Like having AC on full bore. Also starting a charge makes the most bangs and pops, regardless of the charger type.
I just finished a 2000km drive and slept in the back on a sleeping mat. Sometimes I parked right next to the highway where trucks were flying past. It was almost silent inside, they really are well insulated from external noise.
The next Model 3 ("Highland") uses laminated glass in the rear windows, whereas the current one just uses it for the front. Should be the quietest yet.
I suppose I'd get used to the alarms if I used the car but all of them on a page is confusing.
Mildly abrasive 'alert' tones are preferred for warnings over announcements because alerts typically require immediate action. You could follow the alert tone by an announcement but this is typically unnecessary because the the first time you hear it, the tone will be seared into your memory (e.g. you are messing with the radio and suddenly hear the lane departure warning or forward collision warning). And you really don't need to distinguish between them - they all basically mean "immediately allocate all cognitive resources towards driving this death machine safely".
Ha, I'm having flashbacks to my neighbor's old Chrysler New Yorker (from the K car era). "The door is ajar, the door is ajar." And couldn't just say it was open, that doesn't sound fancy enough.
> the first time you hear it, the tone will be seared into your memory
Indeed, the joke is that the Tesla alert tone causes PTSD after you hear it the first time.
See what?
Cute little Easter egg.
In fact, it is one of the most screen reader accessible manuals for any device I've ever seen, most are some weird PDF abominations where all the button names are replaced by their unlabeled icons. Even devices made specifically for the blind have these issues sometimes. This? This is just perfectly readable HTML.
It's especially ironic considering that Teslas (as far as I know) aren't accessible in any way. Even the infotainment system, which a blind person might want to use, for example when waiting for a sighted acquaintance in the car, does not have a screen reader and is not in any way usable.
It has really excellent voice commands for pretty much any function though. Sadly it can only be triggered by pressing the right scroll wheel on the wheel. While possible to just reach over, it's probably not optimal for your suggested use case.