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Where I live in the US my kids still take “cheese buses” to school that haven’t changed a bit. They’re diesel and you can hear them blocks away. When they pull up with their air brakes going off and their diesel shifting to idle it sounds like one of those spice miner things from Dune going to work.

If they ever go electric I’m not sure how we’ll know it’s time to take the kids out. Won’t be able to hear them coming.

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You'll see the bus on your phone / home hub. Like ridezoom company does, you see whenever your kid checked in/out of the bus, and the bus itself on a map.

Hopefully in a way not tied to some commercial third party. People should be able to reliably go to public school without having to accept an arbitrary third party contract

Oh don't worry, you won't even get asked. It's your school district decides to pay a lot of your tax dollars to the third-party company.

My school district has some that are electric and they are quite noisy also. sounds like gear noise mainly, so they must have a reduction gear or some sort of transmission. They also still have air brakes so you hear the compressor and the PSSSSHT of air when they stop.

It wasn't easy, but the bus company managed to make their EV leak oil and need gear maintenance.

> If they ever go electric I’m not sure how we’ll know it’s time to take the kids out. Won’t be able to hear them coming.

I'm sure they'll just have an app.

How about playing a ditty just like an ice cream truck?

There's a similar danger with very quiet and/or electric cars where people near the school barely hear them coming and need more attention to keep themselves safe. Avoiding an older gas or diesel car is practically automatic as you can hear their speed, acceleration and location comparatively far away. I think EV manufacturers have added some sort of noise to low speed driving, but I haven't heard anything beyond one being right behind me

I thought they all had AVAS fitted? Are there markets where this isn’t the case?

Maybe? Problem is either that it can be and is always disabled by driver, or it's very quiet, because I as a healthy man in their 20s, hear the pavement tire noise before any other noise, and the car is already really close at that point

In the EU and UK markets we don’t have an option to disable the AVAS noise generator.

It self disables above something like 10kmh when, as you say, tyre roar is the predominant sound a car makes (unless someone is revving the engine I suppose).

Most pedestrians have airpods in nowadays and probably couldn't hear an ambulance.

I had a silent moped and I had to pass near a school when kids finished school to get to university. It was absolutely dangerous if I was going at a sane speed (less than the limit). I learnt to get very slow before approaching that

They’ll simply use ice-cream van style chimes :)

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