Bugatti CEO Mate Rimac: The future of supercars is combustion engines
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If you want to buy a toy that makes noise, get a non street-legal car for the race track. There is no reason why 99.9..% of the population should be required to tolerate more (street-)noise than necessary.
I only got the feeling of how much calmer it felt without engines revving all around after visiting Guilin, China a couple of years ago. Most cars, trucks, scooters were electric and the only noise I'd hear were tyres rolling, the odd ICE vehicle sounded like a banshee among the rest.
edit: for cars only, motorcycles etc make more
And at highway speed the exceptions like Harley's and glass-packs and high rpm super cars are the problem. It's not the steady whoosh of tire noise that wakes you up in the middle of the night.
Often by design (either the manufacturer or the rider swapping to a louder exhaust) there isn't any reason they can't be quieter and many of them are off the forecourt.
The common argument you run into why people make them loud is its for "safety" but that's always felt like a thin excuse to justify "hey, look at me!" loud exhausts.
Yes, I've owned motorcycles, I commuted using one to work for years, no it been "quiet" didn't make it any less safe.
I do occasionally think about getting another one but the animus simply isn't there any more, I think if I needed transport these days I'd just get a car, for commuting a motorcycle was brilliant (it's legal in the UK to lane split which in heavy rush hour traffic is a real time saver) and they are cheaper to run but in every other way it was strictly worse than a car.
In my state there are no helmet laws so I always find it amusing that the "loud pipes save lives" crew are the same who wear no helmets or any other protective gear.
I still find that one wild.
When I commuted I wore full high viz motorcycle specific textiles (jacket/trousers), proper boots and a helmet with the highest safety rating (on the SHARP system), as with everything in life you can mitigate the risk (in the case of a motorcyle by riding sensibly and appropriate equipment), you can't remove it and riding a motorcycle is inherently more risky compared to other forms of commuting not least because you are sharing the road with much bigger/much heavier vehicles and you are rare enough that a lot of drivers just don't consider Motorcyles - hell one of our road safety campaigns literally had the slogan "Think! Bike".
Never had an off (riding on the road, many times offroad but that's different), had two near misses - one was sand/crap on the road and the front end started to go and the other was a lady pulling straight out into the road from a blind exit (literally a hole in the wall completely blocking her view), I'd gone past that many times on the way home from work and I always slowed down because I'd flagged it as a "yeah, that's just dangerous" so I had time to stop just, she was very apologetic but that wouldn't have helped me much after I'd ploughed into and over her car.
I enjoyed riding motorcycles but they were always fundamentally a tool to me to get from A to B, my friends who ride strictly for pleasure and much less safely have way more crashes (in one case one of them wrote off two bikes in six weeks...).
I disagree with the way they ride and didn't ride with them even when I had a bike, there are literally track days for that stuff, keep it off the public highway where you risk hurting other people for your "fun".
Mind you, that's also putting the blame on bikers partly. Of course it helps, and not splitting lanes like a dumbass at high speeds makes you safer, but the core threat to bikers is, fundamentally, cars & trucks. Being better drivers and being safer is the best way to protect others.
Of course you can regulate thresholds that can not be exceeded as well, but generally I think we should tax externalities more rather than outlaw things whenever possible, and do it much more often. Amp those taxes until the perceived problem goes away, whether because sufficient numbers of people won't pay them or because they're high enough to mitigate the negative effects.
When it comes to supercars, I suspect most of them will end up not being on the road much as the proportion of EV cars gets to a point where it starts to reduce the density of places to fill the tank anyway so to the extent they're a problem it will increasingly limit itself and so it's not really worth wasting time on.
IMHO, pollution is way worse.
I'd rather a tax on gas so high that commuter ICE cars don't exist anymore. Let the enthusiasts who actually enjoy driving burn gas.
So: the future is the past! Specifically all the stuff you thought was cool when you were 17. But now, you have the money to pay for it.
> Researchers noted that modifying a vehicle to make an illegal, disruptive noise at a distance demonstrates the callous disregard for other people's feelings that defines psychopathy.
> Because the sudden noise startles and scares pedestrians or animals, the drivers frequently score high on everyday sadism, meaning they derive personal joy from minorly distressing or startling others.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/human-individual-dif...
> Contrary to my hypothesis, narcissism was not a significant predictor when the other personality dimensions were included. This finding suggests that people may not, in fact, be making their vehicles louder to draw attention to themselves or to say, “Look at me!”
> The results are concerning in that they suggest that individuals who make their vehicles loud may be doing so to deliberately hurt others by disturbing them and that these individuals may be motivated by the negative state that they cause others. Although the study is a pilot study and requires replication, the results are perhaps especially concerning because some media outlets are reporting that the frequency of vehicles with loud exhaust systems has been increasing.
Of course in some markets ICE engines will remain mainstream, and in some they are seen as absolute cringe.
VW ran the numbers and realized they cant compete with Chinese $100K 2000HP EVs accelerating in 2.5 second and beating any supercar.
https://www.arenaev.com/yasa_makes_a_1000hp_electric_motor_t...
I used to think "We're never going to run out of oil, meaning we'll never move off of it." and I was mistaken. After more research, I've come to the conclusion that while we might never run out of oil, refinery capacity will only decline into the future, creating supply chain death spirals over time in various parts of the system. If you want to end the use of fossil fuels, refineries are the weakest link in the chain. No new ones will be built due to the risk of stranded capital and the time to build them considering the forward global oil demand trajectory. [My note: China destroys 1M barrels of daily global oil demand for every 24 months they produce EVs, at current run rates, and has enough EV manufacturing capacity for global demand]
TLDR If rich people are going to burn petroleum instead of biodiesel (used vegetable oil for diesel like engine use cases) or alcohol (top fuel dragsters), good luck refining it yourself or importing it. Similar to how if the end of the world arrives, and you need pharmaceuticals to survive, you'll only last as long as the supply chain for said pharmaceuticals survives if you cannot make it yourself.
Global refinery closure outlook to 2035 - https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/global-refinery-closure... - March 31st, 2025
(think in systems)
Dude is on point to his audience, gotta applause that.
I assume that's your imaginary answer. I'll let you see your way to something more rational.
Bugatti CEO: "that's not a supercar."