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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Above ~30 km/h the noise of a car is mainly from the wheels etc., not the motor. Trust me, you don't want to live next to a highway even if all the cars on it are electric!

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I lived near a train line with a train every 5-15m 24h, Trust me, you don’t want to live near it either…

Yeah, that has societal cost too, to be sure. Which implies prima facie that such infra (roadways, high-frequency train lines) should be minimized. Since the throughout of mass transit is so much higher (iow, the societal cost per-user), mass transit is a better way to minimize those costs than cars.

Add honking, brakes squeals, people blasting music with open windows, etc.

EVs use regen for 99.09% of stops. Honking and loud music is a street problem and has nothing to do with cars. In the horse and carriage days, drivers would be required to carry a bell and whistle to move your butt out of their way.

When I was looking for a house in Seattle, I checked out a nice townhome in Wallingford beneath the I5 ship canal bridge that had a great view of the city. But this was during COVID and the noise was still horrible, so I noped out of that quickly. It was all tire noise.

Saying EVs are still too loud, trust me is the knife's edge of complaining to complain. Just take the win.

Which "win"? There were multiple complaints here, not just noise. These EV incentives have actively hampered other goals and projects for a decade, one could argue it's a net loss.

EV road noise is not a valid and mature complaint for stifling EV adoption.

The point is not about "stifling EV adoption", it's reducing problematic levels of over-dependence on cars in general. EVs don't solve all the issues that cars raise.

Noise is a relevant factor in that discussion, not compared to internal combustion engines[1], but compared to fewer cars in general.

[1] The acronym for this did not age well

They don't solve all problems, but they do make solving the "too much CO2 cooks the planet" problem easier.

I'm all for fewer cars too!

Good thing I had other arguments and a whole article linked as well, then?

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