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Comment by tpm | Hacker News Reader

I live in the center of an EU capital and there are three main sources of ICE noise:

    - motorbikes (with modified exhausts or not, at high speeds the engine itself is loud enough to disturb sleep of thousands of people)
    - 'sport' car abominations with intentionally loud exhaust and engine noises
    - some diesel cars (old vans etc) are very loud, in this case it's just the nature of the diesel engine.

At least the first two cases should be prosecuted by the police and new vehicles not registered. But never have I seen/heard this level of noise being due to an emission control system, in a stopped car.

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Different EU city here, exact same experience. People tune their shitty 25cc motorcycles to sound like a jet engine, people tune their shitty 1200cc cars to sound like a jet engine, and that's 99% of all vehicle-related noise right there.

I live next to a highway on-ramp. The motorcycles are the worst, some of them are so loud while accelerating that it is impossible to have a conversation on my yard, over a hundred meters away.

The city is now investing tens of millions of euros to retrofit a noise barrier to protect our neighborhood. I think our house surfers the most from the noise. Yet - if it only wasn't for those loud motorcycles I would think the noise barrier is unnecessary. It would be much more cost effective to set and enforce noise pollution rules than to build expensive noise protection infrastructure everywhere where people live close to roads.

Reasonably you will lose the discrimination of the "artillery" if you live in a generally loud area - it is not a matter of scalar comparison but of modalities. Place a gasoline vehicle in a parking space and you will hear random bangs from here and there. Bring it to a quiet place, and you will be startled (or worse).

It will probably also depend on the make.

I still don't understand what do you mean. Can you provide an audio/video example?

Very unfortunately, yes, I could ;) (...not right now though.)

But look, if you are trying to understand which noise I was referring to: stop some gasoline cars, from euro-5 on, after the engine has been on for a good number of miles, and after a few minutes you will hear like a "loud bang on metal" (very distinct from the usual crackles from the cooling metal), like a coiled spring loudly released, then after more minutes another one... Even after an hour, or more, it will randomly go on... Silent for a long time, then "bang".

I've got an Euro-5 gasoline car and never noticed anything like that, also when driving other/newer cars, and my office window is to a small parking lot, and there also isn't anything like that happening (I am very sensitive to noises). So I think this must me something specific to a car model.

Never heard. What model? That is not a general thing.

Don't forget smaller mopeds, especially 2-stroke ones.

We luckily don't have many of them here and those we do seem to be comparably quiet.

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